After the trees had been cut in sufficient number--there were
seventy-five of them, each twenty-six feet long--Orde led the way
back up stream a half mile to a shallows, where he commanded the
construction of a number of exaggerated sawhorses with very
widespread slanting legs. In the meantime the cook-wagon and the
bed-wagon had evidently been making many trips to Sand Creek,
fifteen miles away, as was attested by a large pile of heavy planks.
When the sawhorses were completed, Orde directed the picks and
shovels to be brought up.
At this point the river, as has been hinted, widened over shoals.
The banks at either hand, too, were flat and comparatively low. As
is often the case in bends of rivers subject to annual floods, the
banks sloped back for some distance into a lower black-ash swamp
territory.
Orde set his men to digging a channel through this bank. It was no
slight job, from one point of view, as the slope down into the swamp
began only at a point forty or fifty feet inland; but on the other
hand the earth was soft and free from rocks. When completed the
channel gave passage to a rather feeble streamlet from the outer
fringe of the river. The men were puzzled, but Orde, by the strange
freak of his otherwise frank and open nature, as usual told nothing
of his plans, even to Tom North.
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