Rufus was ill at the time, and Mrs. Waterman so anxious and nervous that
processions of boys had to be sent up to the River Farm, giving the frightened
mother the latest bulletins of her son's welfare. Luckily, the river was
narrow just at the Gray Rock, and it was a quite possible task, though no easy
one, to lash two ladders together and make a narrow bridge on which the
drenched and shivering man could reach the shore. There were loud cheers when
Stephen ran lightly across the slender pathway that led to safety--ran so fast
that the ladders had scarce time to bend beneath his weight. He had certainly
"taken chances," but when did he not do that? The logger's life is one of
"moving accidents by flood and field," and Stephen welcomed with wild
exhilaration every hazard that came in his path. To him there was never a dull
hour from the moment that the first notch was cut in the tree (for he
sometimes joined the boys in the lumber camp just for a frolic) till the later
one when the hewn log reached its final destination. He knew nothing of
"tooling" a four-in-hand through narrow lanes or crowded thoroughfares,
--nothing of guiding a horse over the hedges and through the pitfalls of a
stiff bit of hunting country; his steed was the rearing, plunging, kicking
log, and he rode it like a river god.

The crowd loves daring, and so it welcomed Stephen with bravos, but it knew,
as he knew, that he was only doing his duty by the Company, only showing the
Saco that man was master, only keeping the old Waterman name in good repute.
"Ye can't drownd some folks," Old Kennebec had said, as he stood in a group on
the shore; "not without you tie sand-bags to 'em an' drop 'em in the Great
Eddy. I'm the same kind; I remember when I was stranded on jest sech a rock in
the Kennebec, only they left me there all night for dead, an' I had to swim
the rapids when it come daylight."

"We're well acquainted with that rock and them rapids," exclaimed one of the
river-drivers, to the delight of the company.