The men were working at the breast
of it, some underneath, some on top. After a time the jam apparently
broke, pulled downstream a hundred feet or so, and plugged again. Then
it was seen that only a small section had moved, leaving the main body
still jammed, so that between the two sections lay a narrow stretch of
open water. Into this open water one of the men had fallen. Before he
could recover, the second or tail section of the jam started to pull.
Apparently nothing could prevent him from being crushed. A man called
Sam--I don't know his last name--ran down the tail of the first
section, across the loose logs bobbing in the open water, seized the
victim of the accident by the collar, desperately scaled the face of
the moving jam, and reached the top just as the two sections ground
together with the brutish noise of wrecking timbers. It was a
magnificent rescue. Any but these men of iron would have adjourned for
thanks and congratulations.
"Still retaining his hold on the other man's collar, Sam twisted him
about and delivered a vigorous kick. '_There_, damn you!' said he.
That was all. They fell to work at once to keep the jam moving."
I instanced, too, some of the feats of river-work these men could
perform. Of how Jack Boyd has been known to float twenty miles without
shifting his feet, on a log so small that he carried it to the water on
his shoulder; of how a dozen rivermen, one after the other, would often
go through the chute of a dam standing upright on single logs; of
O'Donnell, who could turn a somersault on a floating pine log; of the
birling matches, wherein two men on a single log try to throw each
other into the river by treading, squirrel fashion, in faster and
faster rotation; of how a riverman and spiked boots and a saw-log can
do more work than an ordinary man with a rowboat.
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