I came in to Engineer Lassen, Inspector of rafting sections, and he took me on as he had promised, though it was late in the season now. To begin with, I am to make a tour of the water and see where the logs have gathered thickest, noting down the places on a chart. He is quite a good fellow, the engineer, only still very young. He gives me over-careful instructions about things he fancies I don't know already. It makes him seem a trifle precocious. And so this man has helped Captain Falkenberg out of a mess? The Captain was sorry for it now, no doubt, anxious to free himself from the debt--that was why he was cutting down his timber to the last lot of battens, I thought. And I wished him free of it myself. I was sorry now I had not stayed on marking down a few more days, that he might have enough and to spare. What if it should prove too little, after all? Engineer Lassen was a wealthy man, apparently. He lived at an hotel, and had two rooms there. I never got farther than the office myself, but even there he had a lot of costly things, books and papers, silver things for the writing-table, gilt instruments and things; a light overcoat, silk-lined, hung on the wall. Evidently a rich man, and a person of importance in the place. The local photographer had a large-sized photograph of him in the show-case outside. I saw him, too, out walking in the afternoons with the young ladies of the town. Being in charge of all the timber traffic, he generally walked down to the long bridge--it was four hundred and sixty feet--across the foss, halted there, and stood looking up and down the river. Just by the bridge piers, and on the flat rocks below them, was where the logs were most inclined to jam, and he kept a gang of lumbermen regularly at hand for this work alone. Standing on the bridge there, watching the men at work among the logs, he looked like an admiral on board a ship, young and strong, with power to command. The ladies with him stopped willingly, and stood there on the bridge, though the rush of water was often enough to make one giddy. And the roar of it was such that they had to put their heads together when they spoke. But just in this position, at his post on the bridge, standing there and turning this way and that, there was something smallish and unhandsome about his figure; his sports jacket, fitting tightly at the waist, seemed to pinch, and showed up over-heavy contours behind.