word anywhere," warned Orde. "Secrecy is the watchword
of success with this merry little joke."

The boomerang worked like a charm. The men had been grumbling at an
apparently peaceful yielding of the point at issue, and would have
sacked out many of the blazed logs if Orde had not held them rigidly
to it. Now their spirits flamed into joy again. The sorting went like
clockwork. Orde, in personal charge, watched that through the different
openings in his "boomerang" the "H" logs were shunted into the river.
Shortly the channel was full of logs floating merrily away down the
little blue wavelets. After a while Orde handed over his job to Tom
North.

"Can't stand it any longer, boys," said he. "I've got to go down and see
how the Dutchman is making it."

"Come back and tell us!" yelled one of the crew.

"You bet I will!" Orde shouted back.

He drove the team and buckboard down the marsh road to Heinzman's mill.
There he found evidences of the wildest excitement. The mill had been
closed down, and all the men turned in to rescue logs. Boats plied in
all directions. A tug darted back and forth. Constantly the number of
floating logs augmented, however. Many had already gone by.

"If you think you're busy now," said Orde to himself with a chuckle,
"just wait until you begin to get LOGS."

He watched for a few moments in silence.

"What's he doing with that tug?" thought he. "O-ho! He's stringing booms
across the river to hold the whole outfit."

He laughed aloud, turned his team about, and drove frantically back to
the booms. Every few moments he chuckled. His eyes danced. Hardly could
he wait to get there. Once at the camp, he leaped from the buckboard,
with a shout to the stableman, and ran rapidly out over the booms to
where the sorting of "H" logs was going merrily forward.

"He's shut down his mill," shouted Orde, "and he's got all that gang of
highbankers out, and every old rum-blossom in Monrovia, and I bet if you
say 'logs' to him, he'd chase his tail in circles."

"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