" He was taking John Cardigan up the riverbank and explaining
the situation. "The heavy butt-logs hae sunk to the bottom," he
continued. "Wie a normal head o' water, the lads'll move them, but
wi' the wee drappie we have the noo--" He threw up his hamlike hands
despairingly.
Three days later a cloud-burst filled the river to the brim; it came
at night and swept the river clean of Cardigan's clear logs, An army
of Juggernauts, they swept down on the boiling torrent to tidewater,
reaching the bay shortly after the tide had commenced to ebb.
Now, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a log-boom is
a chaplet of a small logs, linked end to end by means of short
chains; hence when the vanguard of logs on the lip of that flood
reached the log-boom, the impetus of the charge was too great to be
resisted. Straight through the weakest link in this boom the huge
saw-logs crashed and out over Humboldt Bar to the broad Pacific. With
the ebb tide some of them came back, while others, caught in cross-
currents, bobbed about the Bay all night and finally beached at
widely scattered points. Out of the fifteen million feet of logs less
than three million feet were salvaged, and this task in itself was an
expensive operation.
John Cardigan received the news calmly.
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