At one place six or eight were picking
away busily at a jam that had formed bristling quite across the river.
Bob would have liked to stop to watch; but Welton's practised eye saw
nothing to it.
"They're down to the key log, now," he pronounced. "They'll have it out
in a jiffy."
Inside of two miles or so farther they left behind them the last member
of the jam crew and came upon an outlying scout of the "rear." Then
Welton began to take the shorter trails. At the end of another half-hour
the two plumped into the full activity of the rear itself.
Bob saw two crews of men, one on either bank, busily engaged in
restoring to the current the logs stranded along the shore. In some
cases this merely meant pushing them afloat by means of the peavies.
Again, when the timbers had gone hard aground, they had to be rolled
over and over until the deeper water caught them. In extreme cases, when
evidently the freshet water had dropped away from them, leaving them
high and dry, a number of men would clamp on the jaws of their peavies
and carry the logs bodily to the water. In this active work the men were
everywhere across the surface of the river.
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