The river above was covered with logs. Scores came shooting down every minute, striking into the jam like arrows. The most of these stuck in it. Some few went clean over it, or through it, for the first ten minutes, into the hole below. Logs would glance from the slippery black rocks and go a hundred feet clear of the water, such was the strength of the rapid. I saw sticks of free pine--where they struck the rocks one half on--go in halves from end to end like split-beans--logs forty and fifty feet long; yet the owners never cease to wonder how the lumber gets so badly "broomed up;" for the ends of the logs resemble nothing so much as a paint-brush.
The warps were brought, and Villate called for volunteers to go down, or rather be let down, the ledges and prize off the shore ends of the jammed logs with "peevies." There were plenty of bold fellows; but every man hesitated. Murmurs of "_certaine mort_," "_sur mort_," "_porte du tombeau_," "_porte d'enfer_," arose and were repeated.
"It's a hard world, but I wants to tarry in it a spell longer, boss!" said one grizzled old Yankee from the Maine rivers, with a sage shake of his long head. We all knew that when the jam started it would go through like an avalanche. Whoever was down there would have to go with it--into the glut-hole.
In an hour the jam had grown enormously. For a hundred rods up the rapid the channel was full of lumber, "churning" and battering itself. The mass had swayed off to the west bank and was piling up against the ledges on the opposite side. The mighty pressure of the torrent kept rolling the logs, one over the other, till the top of the pile was in places thirty or forty feet out of the water. The bottom logs were wedged into the bed of the stream. The flood, thus dammed and held back, rose higher and higher, rushing through and among the mass with a strange hollow roar which changed the note of the fall. Where it hung in the throat of the pitch, the mass kept rising and falling with the peculiar rhythmic motion of the water. We expected each moment to see it break out and go down; but the tough spruce logs held.
By noon, all the crew had come up. The jam filled the whole river for a third of a mile back from the fall, so completely that during the afternoon the west bank gangs crossed on it to the east side. We lighted our fires on the ledges; and as the evening advanced it was a picturesque sight--a hundred and fifty red-shirted drivers camping there and sitting in messes about their coarse fare.