"I think I drive one more," said Pete, who was drunk with pleasure. "I tink one more for luck." He set the spike in and started to drive it home. Now he was careless and suddenly he slipped. As he tried to recover himself, the sledge flew one way and he flew the other. He dropped between two logs: the one he had been standing on, and one on the boom of logs. That is, one of the boom logs saved his life, for the heavy spikes would have pulled him down if he had had to swim for a minute. As he let a yell out of him and felt a sudden fear of death his hands caught a chain between two of the outer boom logs. He pulled his head out of the water and hung on. The stream was bitter cold, for there was still ice in it. He gasped for breath, but presently got a leg across the chain. With a great effort he clawed the upper edge of the log and clambered back to safety. "Oh," he grunted, as he lay flat and caught his breath, "that a very near ting, Pete." It was a very near thing indeed. But before dawn, as he paddled hard on the flood tide, he was back at Smith's and fast asleep. Next day there was a mighty row about the missing sledge-hammer. "I tink some damn thief kapsualla heem," said Pete. That week the frost returned once more. This time it lasted till the early spring. XIII B.C., as the boys call it, or British Columbia, is most undoubtedly a wonderful place, a first-class place, even if the bottom falls out of it periodically and booms die down into slumps and the world becomes weary. But the odd thing is that it is a country which is, so to speak, all one gut, like a herring. The Fraser Cañon is the gate of the lower country and the gate of the upper country. There's only one way up and down, tilikum, unless you are a crazy prospector or a cracked hunter. Though the great River itself comes from the North past Lillooet and by, and from, Cariboo, yet the main line of men and railroads and wanderers to and fro lies rather by the blue Thompson than the grey Fraser. You meet Bill and Charlie and Tom and Jack and Dick and Harry on the road. You liquor with them at Yale, where the Cañon opens: you toss for drinks with them at French Charlie's, you climb Jackass Mountain with them (or meet them there) and again discuss work and railroading and sawmills and Mr. Vanderdunk, the Contractor, at Lytton. You run against your partner or the man you quarrelled or fought with at Savona. You see Mrs. Grey or Brown or Robinson at Eight Mile Creek. Very likely you get full up at Oregon Pete's with the man you last met at Kamloops, or the son of a gun who worked alongside you at the Inlet. On the Shushwap you tumble up against your brother, maybe, in a sternwheeler, and at Eagle Pass you give cigars (5 cents Punches!) to a dozen whose nicknames you know and whose names you don't.