The man raised his hand and the machinery was suddenly stilled.

“So I perceive,” said he.

“Your boom-piles are drove too far out in the stream.”

“I don’t know about that,” objected the mossback.

“I do,” insisted Larsen.  “Nobody on earth could keep from jamming, the way you got things fixed.”

“That’s none of my business,” said the man steadily.

“Well, we’ll have to take out that fur clump of piles to get our jam broke.”

“I don’t know about that,” repeated the man.

Larsen apparently paid no attention to this last remark, but tramped back to the jam.  There he ordered a couple of men out with axes, and others with tackle.  But at that moment the three men and the boy appeared.  They carried three shotguns and a rifle.

“That’s about enough of that,” said the bearded man, quietly.  “You let my property alone.  I don’t want any trouble with you men, but I’ll blow hell out of the first man that touches those piles.  I’ve had about enough of this riverhog monkey-work.”

He looked as though he meant business, as did his companions.  When the rivermen drew back, he took his position atop the disputed clump of piles, his shotgun across his knees.

The driving crew retreated ashore.  Larsen was plainly uncertain.

“I tell you, boys,” said he, “I’ll get back to town.  You wait.”

“Guess I’ll go along,” suggested Bob, determined to miss no phase of this new species of warfare.

“What you going to do?” he asked Larsen when they were once on the trail.

“I don’t know,” confessed the older man, rubbing his cap.  “I’m just goin’ to see some lawyer, and then I’m goin’ to telegraph the Company.  I wish Darrell was in charge.  I don’t know what to do.  You can’t expect those boys to run a chance of gittin’ a hole in ’em.”

“Do you believe they’d shoot?” asked Bob.

“I believe so.  It’s a long chance, anyhow.”

But in Twin Falls they received scant sympathy and encouragement.  The place was distinctly bucolic, and as such opposed instinctively to larger mills, big millmen, lumber, lumbermen and all pertaining thereunto.  They tolerated the drive because, in the first place they had to; and in the second place there was some slight profit to be made.  But the rough rivermen antagonized them, and they were never averse to seeing these buccaneers of the streams in difficulties.  Then, too, by chance the country lawyers Larsen consulted happened to be attorneys for the little sawmill men.  Larsen tried in his blundering way to express his feeling that “nobody had a right to hang our drive.”  His explanations were so involved and futile that, without thinking, Bob struck in.

“Surely these men have no right to obstruct as they do.  Isn’t there some law against interfering with navigation?”

“The stream is not navigable,” returned the lawyer curtly.