“Jumping fish-hooks!” he cried. “Why, the river's up six inches and still a comin'! Here you, Tom!” he called to one of the yard hands, “you tell Solly to get steam on that tug double quick, and have Dave hustle together his driver crew.”
“What you going to do?” asked Wallace.
“I got to strengthen the booms,” explained the mill foreman. “We'll drive some piles across between the cribs.”
“Is there any danger?”
“Oh, no, the river would have to rise a good deal higher than she is now to make current enough to hurt. They've had a hard rain up above. This will go down in a few hours.”
After a time the tug puffed up to the booms, escorting the pile driver. The latter towed a little raft of long sharpened piles, which it at once began to drive in such positions as would most effectually strengthen the booms. In the meantime the thunder-heads had slyly climbed the heavens, so that a sudden deluge of rain surprised the workmen. For an hour it poured down in torrents; then settled to a steady gray beat. Immediately the aspect had changed. The distant rise of land was veiled; the brown expanse of logs became slippery and glistening; the river below the booms was picked into staccato points by the drops; distant Superior turned lead color and seemed to tumble strangely athwart the horizon.
Solly, the tug captain, looked at his mooring hawsers and then at the nearest crib.
“She's riz two inches in th' las' two hours,” he announced, “and she's runnin' like a mill race.” Solly was a typical north-country tug captain, short and broad, with a brown, clear face, and the steadiest and calmest of steel-blue eyes. “When she begins to feel th' pressure behind,” he went on, “there's goin' to be trouble.”
Towards dusk she began to feel that pressure. Through the rainy twilight the logs could be seen raising their ghostly arms of protest. Slowly, without tumult, the jam formed. In the van the logs crossed silently; in the rear they pressed in, were sucked under in the swift water, and came to rest at the bottom of the river. The current of the river began to protest, pressing its hydraulics through the narrowing crevices. The situation demanded attention.
A breeze began to pull off shore in the body of rain. Little by little it increased, sending the water by in gusts, ruffling the already hurrying river into greater haste, raising far from the shore dimly perceived white-caps. Between the roaring of the wind, the dash of rain, and the rush of the stream, men had to shout to make themselves heard.