“It's Dyer,” gasped the young man. “I found him on the boom! He held me up with a gun while he filed the boom chains between the center piers. They're just ready to go. I got away by diving. Hurry and put in a new chain; you haven't much time!”
“He's a gone-er now,” interjected Solly grimly.—“Charley is on his trail—and he is hit.”
Thorpe's intelligence leaped promptly to the practical question.
“Injin Charley, where'd he come from? I sent him up Sadler & Smith's. It's twenty miles, even through the woods.”
As though by way of colossal answer the whole surface of the jam moved inward and upward, thrusting the logs bristling against the horizon.
“She's going to break!” shouted Thorpe, starting on a run towards the river. “A chain, quick!”
The men followed, strung high with excitement. Hamilton, the journalist, paused long enough to glance up-stream. Then he, too, ran after them, screaming that the river above was full of logs. By that they all knew that Injin Charley's mission had failed, and that something under ten million feet of logs were racing down the river like so many battering rams.
At the boom the great jam was already a-tremble with eagerness to spring. Indeed a miracle alone seemed to hold the timbers in their place.
“It's death, certain death, to go out on that boom,” muttered Billy Mason.
Tim Shearer stepped forward coolly, ready as always to assume the perilous duty. He was thrust back by Thorpe, who seized the chain, cold-shut and hammer which Scotty Parsons brought, and ran lightly out over the booms, shouting,