The thought of the heaped logs in Blunder valley, the memory of the dynamite bellowing its farewell to him over the tree-tops, and now the spectacle of these empty booms, had the eloquence of despair and the pathos of failure for Dwight Wade. And as the two of them--he and his partner--stood there and gazed silently, they were forced to face bitter accentuation of their stricken fortunes. Pulaski D. Britt, master of the Umcolcus drive, came on his way north at the head of his men. It was an army marching with all its impedimenta. There were many huge bateaux swung upon trucks that had hauled them around the white-water. Men launched them into the eddy above the Hulling Machine, and began to load them with tents, cordage, and the wangan stores. Rodburd Ide and his young partner stood at one side, and surveyed this scene of activity without speaking. And Britt marched up to them, raucous and domineering with the masterfulness of the river tyrant. It had long been the saying along the Umcolcus that Pulaski Britt got mad a week before the driving season opened, and stayed mad a week after it ended. "Ide," he cried, "you and I seem to be always in trouble with each other lately! But it's of your own makin', not mine! These sheer-booms that you've stuck in here obstruct navigation. I want to get my boats up. You've got to cut these booms loose." "Mr. Britt," returned Ide, his tones quivering with passion, "two men in each bateau crew can shove those booms down with pick-poles and let a bateau over without wasting a minute's time. You've brought those bateaux over all your own sheer-booms below here--you've got your own booms above. You've been riding over 'em for thirty years. Now be reasonable." "You run back down there to your store and get onto your job of sellin' kerosene and crackers," advised the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically. "Don't you undertake to tell me my business. As river-master, I say those logs obstruct navigation, and what I say on this river goes!" "You talk, Britt, as though a title that you've grabbed onto, the same as you have everything else along this river, amounted to anything in law," objected the magnate of Castonia. "I own the land that those booms are hitched to, and you're not goin' to bluff me by any of your obstruction-to-navigation talk. You've managed to get most things along this river this spring your own way, but I reckon I know when you've gone about far enough. Don't try to rub it in!" Mr. Britt, serene in his autocracy as drive-master, was in no mood to bandy arguments nor waste time on such as Rodburd Ide. He whirled away, lifted a wooden box from one of the wagons, and set it down gingerly. "MacLeod!" he called. The boss came away from the river-bank, where he was superintending stowing of supplies. "Unpack this dynamite, and blow damnation out of those booms--the sortin'-gap first!" The man twisted his face in a queer grimace. "I don't think I'll do it, Mr. Britt," he said, curtly.