ousers, "stagged" off at the knee;
the spikes of his river boots cutting little triangular pieces from the
wooden sidewalk. His eye was aggressively humorous, and the smile of his
face was a challenge.

For in the last month he had faced almost certain death a dozen times a
day. He had ridden logs down the rapids where a loss of balance meant
in one instant a ducking and in the next a blow on the back from some
following battering-ram; he had tugged and strained and jerked with his
peavey under a sheer wall of tangled timber twenty feet high,--behind
which pressed the full power of the freshet,--only to jump with the
agility of a cat from one bit of unstable footing to another when the
first sharp CRACK warned him that he had done his work, and that the
whole mass was about to break down on him like a wave on the shore; he
had worked fourteen hours a day in ice-water, and had slept damp; he had
pried at the key log in the rollways on the bank until the whole pile
had begun to rattle down into the river like a cascade, and had jumped,
or ridden, or even dived out of danger at the last second. In a hundred
passes he had juggled with death as a child plays with a rubber balloon.
No wonder that he has brought to the town and his vices a little of the
lofty bearing of an heroic age. No wonder that he fears no man, since
nature's most terrible forces of the flood have hurled a thousand
weapons at him in vain. His muscles have been hardened, his eye is quiet
and sure, his courage is undaunted, and his movements are as quick
and accurate as a panther's. Probably nowhere in the world is a more
dangerous man of his hands than the riverman. He would rather fight than
eat, especially when he is drunk, as, like the cow-boy, he usually is
when he gets into town. A history could be written of the feuds, the
wars, the raids instituted by one camp or one town against another.

The men would go in force sometimes to another city with the avowed
purpose of cleaning it out. One battle I know of lasted nearly all
night. Deadly weapons were almost never resorted to, unless indeed a
hundred and eighty pounds of muscle behind a fist hard as iron might be
considered a deadly weapon. A man hard pressed by numbers often resorted
to a billiard cue, or an ax, or anything else that happened to be
handy, but that was an expedient called out by necessity. Knives or
six-shooters implied a certain premeditation which was discountenanced.

On the other