"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."

I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
water among the filled booms.

"Drive's just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
apart."

A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
and a half diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back and
forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran the
length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
statue of bronze.

A roar approved this feat.

"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hell
_and_ repeat. Watch him."

The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.

For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
the air. Then suddenly _slap! slap!_ the heavy caulks stamped a
reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
some animal that had been spurred through its paces.

"Magnificent!" I cried.

"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
log. Watch this."

Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
Then he turned a somersault.

This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause whic