Suddenly a man on the bank began to sing. A solitary voice, a rich baritone, it cut across the canned syncopation and lifted with the diapason of the rapids as a tonal background. There was nothing strange in that. Men often sang there, soloists and impromptu quartettes. They sang to amuse themselves, or because they were happy, for any or all the reasons that move men to song. It was not the fact of the man singing. It was his song. "Ye sons of freedom awake to glory. Hark! Hark! What myriads bid you rise." The third line came with a volume that burst the evening hush like the roll of drums. From a hundred-odd throats it poured in rhythmic unison, with a passionate earnestness, and something akin to a threat. "Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary, Behold their tears and hear their cries. Behold their tears and hear their cries. Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding With hireling hosts a ruffian band Affright and desolate the land, While truth and liberty lie bleeding? To arms, to arms! Ye brave. The avenging sword unsheathe. March on. March on. All hearts resolved On liberty ... or death!" The last word struck like the blow of a ponderous hammer falling on muffled iron. Then silence,--as if it had been halted by some invisible conducting baton which had welded that impromptu chorus into a single harmonious whole to chant that old, old song of revolt against oppression. Who that has ever heard a marching regiment sing the Marseillaise but knows the clang of its ending, like the snick of a breech-bolt or a great sword clashed home in its scabbard. No one moved. No voices lifted in words or laughter. Rod, sitting with his chin in his palms, listened with a curious tension for a break in that sudden hush. The massed group on the bank remained immobile, very quiet, as if something profoundly sobering had come over them. And in the midst of this strange quiescence a gong struck faintly, deep in the bowels of the _Kowloon_, and when the deckhands flicked off the mooring lines she backed slowly out into the channel, out into the gathering dusk, the jazz tunes stilled, her guests standing quietly in a group by the after rail. CHAPTER XXX As the reaping machines pass over a field of wheat at harvest time mowing swath after swath until there is nothing left but bristling stubble, so the men and machinery under Rod's direction mowed the forest, harvesting that great crop which the centuries had matured. Day by day the logs poured into the booming ground. Week by week tugs departed, towing enormous rafts. The mills chewed up these logs and spewed them forth as squared timbers, in wide boards and narrow, in beautifully finished materials out of which carpenters in far cities fashioned roofs over the heads of other men.