round, with the little strips of blue water showing between like a
fantastic pattern. While Bob looked, a man ran out over them. He was
dressed in short trousers, heavy socks, and spiked boots, and a faded
blue shirt. The young man watched with interest, old memories of his
early boyhood thronging back on him, before his people had moved from
Monrovia and the "booms." The man ran erratically, but with an accurate
purpose. Behind him the big logs bent in dignified reminiscence of his
tread, and slowly rolled over; the little logs bobbed frantically in a
turmoil of white water, disappearing and reappearing again and again,
sleek and wet as seals. To these the man paid no attention, but leaped
easily on, pausing on the timbers heavy enough to support him, barely
spurning those too small to sustain his weight. In a moment he stopped
abruptly without the transitorial balancing Bob would have believed
necessary, and went calmly to pushing mightily with a long pike-pole.
The log on which he stood rolled under the pressure; the man quite
mechanically kept pace with its rolling, treading it in correspondence
now one way, now the other. In a few moments thus he had forced the mass
of logs before him toward an inclined plane leading to the second story
of the mill.

Up this ran an endless chain armed with teeth. The man pushed one of the
logs against the chain; the teeth bit; at once, shaking itself free of
the water, without apparent effort, without haste, calmly and leisurely
as befitted the dignity of its bulk, the great timber arose. The water
dripped from it, the surface streamed, a cheerful _patter, patter_ of
the falling drops made itself heard beneath the mill noises. In a moment
the log disappeared beneath projecting eaves. Another was just behind
it, and behind that yet another, and another, like great patient beasts
rising from the coolness of a stream to follow a leader through the
narrowness, of pasture bars. And in the booms, up the river, as far as