hem by force. Once Captain Marsh was found up to
his waist in water, himself felling the trees of a wood, and dragging
them to the river by a cable attached to the winch of his tug. Night
followed day; and day night again. None of the crews realised the fact.
The men were caught in the toils of a labour ceaseless and eternal.
Never would it end, just as never had it begun. Always were they to
handle piles, steam hammers and the implements of their trade, menaced
by a jam on the point of breaking, wet by a swollen and angry flood,
over-arched by a clear calm sky or by the twinkling peaceful stars. Long
since had they ceased to reckon with the results of what they did,
the consequences either to themselves or to the jam. Mechanically they
performed their labour. Perhaps the logs would kill them. Perhaps these
long, black, dripping piles they drove were having some effect on the
situation. Neither possibility mattered.

Then all at once, as though a faucet had been turned off, the floods
slackened.

"They've opened the channel," said Orde dully. His voice sounded to
himself very far away. Suddenly the external world, too, seemed removed
to a distance, far from his centre of consciousness. He felt himself
moving in strange and distorted surroundings; he heard himself repeating
to each of a number of wavering, gigantic figures the talismanic words
that had accomplished the dissolution of the earth for himself: "They've
opened the channel." At last he felt hard planks beneath his feet, and,
shaking his head with an effort, he made out the pilot-house of the
SPRITE and a hollow-eyed man leaning against it. "They've opened the
channel, Marsh," he repeated. "I guess that'll be all." Then quite
slowly he sank to the deck, sound asleep.

Welton, returning from his labours with the iron bridge and the
jam, found them thus. Men slept on the deck of the tug, aboard the
pile-driver. Two or three had even curled up in the crevices of the jam,
resting in the arms of the monster they had subdued.

XLII

When Newmark left, in the early stages of the jam, he gave scant thought
to the errand on which he had ostensibly departed. Whether or nor Orde
got a supply of piles was to him a matter of indifference. His hope,
or rather preference was that the jam should go out; but he saw clearly
what Orde, blinded by the swift action of the struggle, was as yet
unable to perceive. Even should the riverman succeed in stopping the
jam, th