about midnight
`` Drive 's just over , '' my new friend informed me . `` Rear come down last night . Fourther July celebration . This little town will scratch fer th ' tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her apart . '' A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot and a half diameter into the clear water , where it lay rocking back and forth , three or four feet from the boom piles . Suddenly a man ran the length of the boom , leaped easily into the air , and landed with both feet square on one end of the floating log . That end disappeared in an ankle-deep swirl of white foam , the other rose suddenly , the whole timber , projected forward by the shock , drove headlong to the middle of the little pond .