Hate smoldered in the swinish eyes as, in the seclusion of the office, he glowered and planned and rumbled his throaty threats. "The drive," he muttered. "My Bucko Bill, you're right now picked for the drive, an' I'll see to it myself that you git yourn in the river." CHAPTER XXIV THE LOG JAM The feel of spring filled the air; the sun swung higher and higher; and the snow turned dark and lay soggy with water. With the increasing warmth of the longer days, men's thoughts turned to the drive. They talked of water-front streets, with their calk-riddled plank sidewalks and low-fronted bars; of squalid back wine-rooms, where for a week they would be allowed to bask, sodden, in the smiles of the painted women--then, drugged, beaten, and robbed, would wake up in a filthy alley and hunt up a job in the mills. It was all in a lifetime, this annual spring debauch. The men accepted it as part of the ordered routine of their lives; accepted it without shame or regret, boasting and laughing unblushingly over past episodes--facing the future gladly and without disgust. "You mind Jake Sonto's place, where big Myrtle hangs out? They frisked Joe Manning fer sixty bucks last year. I seen 'em do it. What! Me? I was too sleepy to give a cuss--they got mine, too." And so the talk drifted among them. Revolting details of abysmal man-failings, brutal reminiscences of knock-out drops, robbery, and even murder, furnished the themes for jest and gibe which drew forth roars of laughter. And none sought to avoid the inevitable; rather, they looked forward to it in brutish anticipation, accepting it as a matter of course. For so had lumber-jacks been drugged, beaten, and robbed since the first pine fell--and so will they continue to be drugged, beaten, and robbed until the last log is jerked, dripping, from the river and the last white board is sawed. On the night of the 8th of April the cut was complete, and on the morning of the 9th ten million feet of logs towered on the rollways along the river, ready for the breaking up of the ice. Stromberg had banked the bird's-eye to his own satisfaction, and Moncrossen selected his crew for the drive--white-water men, whose boast it was that they never had walked a foot from the timber to the mills; bateau men, who laughed in the face of death as they swarmed over a jam; key-log men, who scorned dynamite; bend watchers, whose duty it is to stay awake through the long, warm days and prevent the formation of jams as the drive shoots by--each selected with an eye to previous experience and physical fitness. For, among all occupations of men, log driving stands unique for its hardships of peril, discomfort, and bone-racking toil. From the breaking out of the rollways until the last log slips smoothly into its place in the boom-raft, no man's life is safe.