Its appearance
was signal for shouts of delighted and ironic encouragement; its
tribulations--which at first, in the white-water, were many--the
occasion for unsympathetic and unholy joy. Charlie looked on all
spectators as enemies. Part of the time he merely glowered. Part
of the time he tried to reply in kind. To his intense disgust, he
was taken seriously in neither case.
In a couple of hours' run the wanigan had overtaken and left far
behind the rear of the drive. All about floated the logs, caroming
gently one against the other, shifting and changing the pattern of
their brown against the blue of the water. The current flowed
strongly and smoothly, but without obstruction. Everything went
well. The banks slipped by silently and mysteriously, like the
unrolling of a panorama--little strips of marshland, stretches of
woodland where the great trees leaned out over the river, thickets
of overflowed swampland with the water rising and draining among
roots in a strange regularity of its own. The sun shone warm.
There was no wind. Newmark wrung out his outer garments, and basked
below the gunwale. Zeke and his companion pulled spasmodically on
the sweeps. Charlie, having regained his equanimity together with
his old brown derby, which he came upon floating sodden in an eddy,
marched up and down the broad gunwale with his pike-pole, thrusting
away such logs as threatened interference.
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