y days. It ought to be done in that. Sanders
will keep time for you, and Merrill will cook. You can get a pretty good
crew from the East Branch, where the drive is just over."

When Daly had quite finished his remarks, Jimmy got up and went out
without a word. Two days later he and sixty men were breaking rollways
forty-five miles up-stream.

Jimmy knew as well as Daly that the latter had given him a hard task.
Twenty days was too brief a time. However, that was none of his
business.

The logs, during the winter, had been piled in the bed of the stream.
They extended over three miles of rollways. Jimmy and his crew began at
the down-stream end to tumble the big piles into the current. Sometimes
only two or three logs would rattle down; at others the whole deck would
bulge outward, hover for a moment, and roar into the stream like grain
from an elevator. Shortly the narrows below the rollways jammed. Twelve
men were detailed as the jam crew. Their business was to keep the stream
free in order that the constantly increasing supply from the rollways
might not fill up the river. It was not an easy business, nor a very
safe. As the "jam" strung out over more and more of the river, the jam
crew was constantly recruited from the men on the rollways. Thus some of
the logs, a very few, the luckiest, drifted into the dam pond at Grand
Rapids within a few days; the bulk jammed and broke and jammed again at
a point a few miles below the rollways, while a large proportion
stranded, plugged, caught, and tangled at the very rollways themselves.

Jimmy had permitted himself two days in which to "break out" the
rollways. It was done in two. Then the "rear" was started. Men in the
rear crew had to see that every last log got into the current. When a
jam broke, the middle of it shot down-stream in a most spectacular
fashion, but along the banks "winged out" most distressingly. Sometimes
the heavy sticks of timber had been forced right out on the dry land.
The rear crew lifted them back. When an obstinate log grounded, they
jumped cheerfully into the water--with the rotten ice swirling around
them--and pried the thing off bottom. Between times they stood upright
on single, unstable logs and pushed mightily with poles, while the
ice-water sucked in and out of their spiked river shoes.

As for the compensations, naturally there was a good deal of rivalry
between the men on the right and left banks of the river as to which
"wing" should