y, yet without haste. The porcupines invaded the sleeping camp.
From the whole length of the river rang the hollow BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, of
timbers striking one against the other.

The drive was on.

Chapter XLVII

In the meantime the main body of the crew under Thorpe and his foremen
were briskly tumbling the logs into the current. Sometimes under the
urging of the peaveys, but a single stick would slide down; or again a
double tier would cascade with the roar of a little Niagara. The men had
continually to keep on the tension of an alert, for at any moment they
were called upon to exercise their best judgment and quickness to keep
from being carried downward with the rush of the logs. Not infrequently
a frowning sheer wall of forty feet would hesitate on the brink of
plunge. Then Shearer himself proved his right to the title of riverman.

Shearer wore caulks nearly an inch in length. He had been known to ride
ten miles, without shifting his feet, on a log so small that he could
carry it without difficulty. For cool nerve he was unexcelled.

"I don't need you boys here any longer," he said quietly.

When the men had all withdrawn, he walked confidently under the front
of the rollway, glancing with practiced eye at the perpendicular wall of
logs over him. Then, as a man pries jack-straws, he clamped his peavey
and tugged sharply. At once the rollway flattened and toppled. A mighty
splash, a hurl of flying foam and crushing timbers, and the spot on
which the riverman had stood was buried beneath twenty feet of solid
green wood. To Thorpe it seemed that Shearer must have been overwhelmed,
but the riverman always mysteriously appeared at one side or the other,
nonchalant, urging the men to work before the logs should have ceased to
move. Tradition claimed that only once in a long woods life had Shearer
been forced to "take water" before a breaking rollway: and then he saved
his peavey. History stated that he had never lost a man on the river,
simply and solely because he invariably took the dangerous tasks upon
himself.

As soon as the logs had caught the current, a dozen men urged them
on. With their short peaveys, the drivers were enabled to prevent the
timbers from swirling in the eddies--one of the first causes of a jam.
At last, near the foot of the flats, they abandoned them to the stream,
confident that Moloney and his crew would see to their passage down the
river.

In three days the rollways were broken