“Want this job?” North asked him.
“No,” said Orde, suddenly fallen solemn, “haven't time. I'm going to take Marsh and the SPRITE and go to town. Old Heinzman,” he added as an afterthought, “is stringing booms across the river—obstructing navigation.”
He ran down the length of the whole boom to where lay the two tugs.
“Marsh,” he called when still some distance away, “got up steam?”
There appeared a short, square, blue-clad man, with hard brown cheeks, a heavy bleached flaxen moustache, and eyes steady, unwavering, and as blue as the sky.
“Up in two minutes,” he answered, and descended from the pilot house to shout down a low door leading from the deck into the engine room.
“Harvey,” he commanded, “fire her up!”
A tall, good-natured negro reached the upper half of his body from the low door to seize an armful of the slabs piled along the narrow deck. Ten minutes later the SPRITE, a cloud of white smoke pouring from her funnel, was careening down the stretch of the river.
Captain Marsh guided his energetic charge among the logs floating in the stream with the marvellous second instinct of the expert tugboat man. A whirl of the wheel to the right, a turn to the left—the craft heeled strongly under the forcing of her powerful rudder to avoid by an arm's-length some timbers fairly flung aside by the wash. The displacement of the rapid running seemed almost to press the water above the level of the deck on either side and about ten feet from the gunwale. As the low marshes and cat-tails flew past, Orde noted with satisfaction that many of the logs, urged one side by the breeze, had found lodgment among the reeds and in the bayous and inlets. One at a time, and painfully, these would have to be salvaged.
In a short time the mills' tall smokestacks loomed in sight. The logs thickened until it was with difficulty that Captain Marsh could thread his way among them at all. Shortly Orde, standing by the wheel in the pilot-house, could see down the stretches of the river a crowd of men working antlike.