The spring “break-up” had come that very morning, and the whole surface of the river was heaving with huge ice-cakes that ground and crushed against each other as they were swept seaward upon the crest of the resistless flood.
“Ye can’t do no good that-a-way!” called a man to those who ran out upon the shore floe.
“Nor no other way, neither!” supplemented another. “His cake ain’t a-goin’ to rub the shore ice, nohow—an’ he’ll be past ’fore they c’n git there.”
“Isn’t there something we can do?” cried a young man—evidently a chechako.
“Not a blame thing!” answered another. “It’s tough, pardner, to hev to stand an’ see a man carried down ag’in’ that—but it's got to be.” He pointed toward a spot a half-mile below, where, at the head of a white-water rapid, the ice-cakes had formed a huge jam. Cake after cake swept against the barrier, reared high—crunching, grinding, climbing—only to fall back upon other cakes with the roar of a thousand thunders. And it was toward this that the man on the floe was drifting in the middle of the mile-wide river! Men on the bank stared in white-faced fascination,
