A slim,
graceful, handsome boy of twenty, known as "Rollway Charlie," also
distinguished himself by the quickness and certainty of his work.
Often the men standing near lost sight of him entirely in the spray,
the confusion, the blur of the breaking rollways, until it seemed
certain he must have perished. Nevertheless, always he appeared at
right or left, sometimes even on a log astream, nonchalant, smiling,
escaped easily from the destructive power he had loosed. Once in
the stream the logs ran their appointed course, watched by the men
who herded them on their way. And below, from the tributaries, from
the other rollways a never-ending procession of recruits joined this
great brown army on its way to the lake, until for miles and miles
the river was almost a solid mass of logs.
The crews on the various beats now had their hands full to keep the
logs running. The slightest check at any one point meant a jam, for
there was no way of stopping the unending procession. The logs
behind floated gently against the obstruction and came to rest. The
brown mass thickened. As far as the eye could reach the surface of
the water was concealed. And then, as the slow pressure developed
from the three or four miles of logs forced against each other by
the pushing of the current, the breast of the jam began to rise.
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