On the following day McWha went to work again, but not till after breakfast, when the others had long departed. Rosy-Lilly, with one hand twisted in her little apron, was standing in the doorway as he passed out. She glanced up at him with the most coaxing smile in her whole armoury of allurements. McWha would not look at her, and his face was as sullenly harsh as ever; but as he passed he slipped something into her hand. To her speechless delight, it proved to be a little dark-brown wooden doll, daintily carved, and with two white beads, with black centres, cunningly set into its face for eyes.
Rosy-Lilly hugged the treasure to her breast. Her first proud impulse was to run to Jimmy Brackett with it. But a subtler instinct withheld her. The gift had been bestowed in such a surreptitious way that she felt it to be somehow a kind of secret. She carried it away and hid it in her bunk, where she would go and look at it from time to time throughout the day. That night she brought it forth, but with several other treasures, so that it quite escaped comment. She said nothing about it to McWha, but she played with it when he could not help seeing it. And thereafter her “nigger-baby” was always in her arms.
This compliment, however, was apparently all lost 133 on McWha, who had again grown unconscious of her existence. And Rosy-Lilly, on her part, no longer strove to win his attention. She was content either with the victory she had won, or with the secret understanding which, perforce, now existed between them. And things went on smoothly in the camp, with every one now too occupied to do more than mind his own business.
It chanced this year that the spring thaws were early and unusually swift, warm rains alternating with hot, searching sunshine which withered and devoured the snow. The ice went out with a rush in the rapidly rising Ottanoonsis; and from every brookside “landing” the logs came down in black, tumbling swarms. Just below Conroy’s Camp the river wallowed round a narrow bend, tangled with slate ledges. It was a nasty place enough at low water, but in freshet a roaring terror to all the river-men. When the logs were running in any numbers, the bend had to be watched with vigilance lest a jam should form, and the waters be dammed back, and the lumber get “hung up” all over the swamps of the upper reaches.
And here, now, in spite of the frantic efforts of Dave Logan and his crew, the logs suddenly began to jam. Pitching downward as if propelled by a pile-driver, certain great timbers drove their ends between the upstanding strata of the slate, and held against the torrent till others came and wedged them 134 securely. The jam began between two ledges in midstream, where no one could get near it. In a few minutes the interlocked mass stretched from bank to bank, with the torrent spurting and spouting through it in furious milk-white jets. Log after log was chopped free by the axemen along the shore, but the mass remained unshaken. Meanwhile the logs were gathering swiftly behind, ramming down and solidifying the whole structure, and damming back the flood till its heavy thunder diminished to the querulous rattling of a mill-race. In a short time the river was packed solid from shore to shore for several hundred yards above the brow of the jam; and above that again the waters were rising at a rate which threatened in a few hours to flood the valley and sweep away the camp itself.
At this stage of affairs the Boss, axe in hand, picked his way across the monstrous tangle of the face of the jam between the great white jets, till he gained the centre of the structure. Here his practised eye, with the aid of a perilous axe-stroke here and there,––strokes which might possibly bring the whole looming mass down upon him in a moment,––presently located the timbers which held the structure firm, “the key-logs,” as the men call them. These he marked with his axe. Then, returning to the shore, he called for two volunteers to dare the task of cutting these key-logs away.
Such a task is the most perilous that a lumberman, 135 in all his daring career, can be called upon to perform. So perilous is it that it is always left to volunteers. Dave Logan had some brilliant feats of jam-breaking to his credit, from the days before he was made a Boss; and now, when he called for volunteers, every unmarried man in camp responded, with the exception, of course, of Walley Johnson, whose limited vision unfitted him for such a venture. The Boss chose Bird Pigeon and Andy White, because they were not only “smart” axemen, but also adepts in the river-men’s games of “running logs.”
With a jaunty air the two young men spat on their hands, gripped their axes, and sprang out along the base of the jam. Every eye in camp was fixed upon them with a fearful interest as they plied their heavy blades. It was heroic, of a magnificence of valour seldom equalled on any field, the work of these two, chopping coolly out there in the daunting tumult, under that colossal front of death. Their duty was nothing less than to bring the toppling brow of the jam down upon them, yet cheat Fate at the last instant, if possible, by leaping to shore before the chaos quite overwhelmed them.
Suddenly, while the two key-logs were not yet half cut through, the trained eye of the Boss detected a settling near the top of the jam. His yell of warning tore through the clamour of the waters. At the instant came a vast grumbling, like underground 136 thunder, not loud apparently, yet dulling all other sounds. The two choppers sprang wildly for shore, as the whole face of the jam seemed to crumble in a breath.
At this moment a scream of terror was heard––and every heart stopped. Some thirty yards or so upstream, and a dozen, perhaps, from shore, stood Rosy-Lilly, on a log. While none were observing her she had gleefully clambered out over the solid mass, looking for spruce-gums. But now, when the logs moved, she was so terror-stricken that she could not even try to get ashore. She just fell down upon her log, and clung to it, screaming.