XVIIA Practical Man
XVIIA Practical Man
Bruce’s thoughts were a jumble of dynamos and motors, direct and alternating currents, volts and amperes, when James J. Jennings’ papier-mache suitcase hit him in the shins in the lobby of a hotel which was headquarters for mining men in the somnolent city on the Pacific coast.
Jennings promptly dropped the suitcase and thrust out a hand which still had ground into the knuckles oil and smudge acquired while helping put up a power-plant in Alaska.
“Where did you come from—what are you doing here?” Bruce had seen him last in Alberta.
“Been up in the North Country, but”—James lifted a remarkable upper lip in a shy grin of ecstasy—“I aims to git married and stay in the States.”
“Shoo—you don’t say so!” Bruce exclaimed, properly surprised and congratulatory.
“Yep,” he beamed, then dropped, as he added mournfully, “So fur I’ve had awful bad luck with my wives; they allus die or quit me.”
Bruce ventured the hope that his luck might change with this, his last—and as Jennings explained—fifth venture.
“I kinda think it will,” the prospective bridegroom declared hopefully. “Bertha looks—er—lasty. But what about you?—I never knew you’d even saw a city.”
“I’m a sure enough Sourdough,” Bruce admitted, “but I did stray out of the timber. Register, andI’ll tell you all about it—maybe you can help me.”
Jennings, Bruce commented mentally as he watched him walk to the desk, was not exactly the person he would have singled out as the hero of five serious romances. Even five years before, in the Kootnai country, Jennings had been no matinee idol and Time had not been lenient.
He had bent knees, protuberant, that seemed to wobble. A horseman would have called him knee-sprung and declared he stumbled. His back was stooped so his outline was the letter S, andCAREwas written in capitals on his corrugated brow. No railroad president with a strike on ever wore a heavier air of responsibility, though the suitcase which gave out an empty rattle contained James’s earthly all. His teeth were yellow fangs and his complexion suggested a bad case of San José scale, but his distinctive feature was a long elastic upper lip which he had a habit of puffing out like a bear pouting in a trap. Yet James’s physical imperfections had been no handicap, as was proved by the fact that he was paying alimony into two households and the bride on the horizon was contemplating matrimony with an enthusiasm equal to his own.
While Jennings breakfasted Bruce told him the purpose of his visit to the Pacific coast, hoping that out of the wide experience with machinery which Jennings claimed he might make some useful suggestions; besides Bruce found it a relief to talk the situation over with someone he had known.
“I don’t pretend to know the first thing about electrical machinery,” he said frankly, “I only know the results I want—that I must have. I’ve got to rely on the judgment and honesty of others and there’ssuch a diversity of opinion that I tell you, Jennings, I’m scared to death lest I make a mistake. And I can’t afford to make a mistake. I’ve left myself no margin for mistakes, every dollar has got to count.”
“There’s one thing you want to remember when you’re workin’ in an isolated country, and that’s the need of strength—strength and simplicity. These new-fangled—”
Bruce interrupted eagerly—
“My idea exactly—durability. If anything breaks down there that can’t he repaired on the place it means laying off the crew from a month to six weeks while the parts are going in and out to the factory.”
Jennings nodded.
“That’s it—that’s why I say strength above everything.” Nearly half a century of frying-pan bread had given Jennings indigestion and now as he sipped his hot water he pondered, bursting out finally—“If I was you, Burt, I’ll tell you what I’d do, I’d install the old type Edison machines for that very reason. You can’t break ’em with a trip hammer. They’re so simple a kid can run ’em. There’s nothin’ about ’em to git out of repair onct they’re up. If you aim to work that ground with scrapers, I’ll tell you now it’s goin’ to be a big drag on the motors. Of course they’re a little bit heavier than these new-fangled—”
“But the agents tell me these newer and lighter machines will stand it.”
Jennings blew out his elastic upper lip and shrugged a shoulder:
“Maybe they know more than I do—maybe they do, but it’s to their interest to talk ’em up, ain’t it? I’m no college electrician—I’m a practical man and I been around machinery nigh to fifty years, so I knowthem old-fashioned motors. They’ll stand an overload, and take my word for it they’ll git it on them scrapers. These new-fangled machines will stand jest about what they’re rated at and you can’t tell me anything differenter.Isay them old type Edison machines is the thing for rough work in that kind of a country. Ain’t I seen what they can do on drudgers? Besides, you can pick ’em up for half the price and as good as new with a little repairin’.”
“I wonder if theywoulddo the work,” Bruce murmured to himself thoughtfully.
“What interest would I have in tellin’ you if they wouldn’t?” Jennings demanded.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Bruce assured him quickly. “I was thinking that if they would do the work and I could save something on the price of machinery I’d sure breathe easier.”
“Do the work!” scornfully. “You can pull off a chunk of mountain with a good donkey-engine and them motors. Why, on the drudgers up here in Alasky—”
“Do you know where you can get hold of any of these machines?”
“I think I do,” Jennings reflected. “Before I went down North I knowed where they was a couple if they ain’t been sold.”
“Suppose you look them up and find out their condition—will you do this for me?”
“Bet I will, old man, I’d like to see you make a go of it. I gotta show up at Bertha’s, then I’ll run right out and look ’em over and report this evenin’.”
Jennings kept his word and when Bruce saw him cross the office with a spray of lilies-of-the-valley in his buttonhole and stepping like an English cob heguessed that he either had been successful or his call upon Bertha had been eminently satisfactory. He was correct, it proved, in both surmises.
“They’re there yet” he announced with elation, “in good shape, too. The motors need re-winding and there’s some other little tinkerin’, but aside from that—say, my boy, you’re lucky—nearly as lucky as I am. I tell you I’m goin’ to git a great little woman!”
“Glad to hear it, Jennings. But about this machinery, what’s it going to weigh? I don’t know that I told you but I mean to take it down the river.”
“Bad water?”
“It’s no mill-pond,” Bruce answered dryly, “full of rapids.” Jennings looked a little startled, and Bruce added:
“The weight is a mighty important feature.”
Jennings hesitated.
“The dynamos will weigh close to 22,000 pounds, and the whole 55,000 pounds approximately.”
“They weigh a-plenty,” Bruce looked thoughtful, “but I reckon I can bring them if I must. And there’s no doubt about the must, as a wagon road in there would cost $20,000.”
As the outcome of the chance meeting Bruce bought the machines upon Jennings’s recommendation with a saving of much money and Jennings furthermore was engaged to make the necessary repairs and install the plant on the river. It was a load off Bruce’s mind to feel that this part of the work was safe in the hands of a practical, experienced man accustomed to coping with the emergencies which arise when working far from transportation facilities.
Once this was settled there was nothing more forBruce to do in the city and a great deal to be done upon the river, so he bade good-bye to Jennings and left immediately.
On the journey from the Pacific coast to Spokane the gritting of the car-wheels was a song of success, of achievement. Bruce felt himself alive to the finger-tips with the joy of at last being busy at something worth while. He looked back upon the times when he had thought himself happy with profound pity for his ignorance.
When he had stretched himself at night on his mattress of pine-boughs with his head on the bear-grass pillow watching through the cabin window the moon rise out of the “draw” where Big Squaw creek headed, he had thought that he was happy. When he had found a bit of float that “panned,” a ledge that held possibilities, or the yellow flakes had shown up thicker than usual in the day’s clean-up he had called this satisfaction, the momentary exhilaration, happiness. When he had landed a battling “red-side” after a struggle and later thrust his fork through the crisp, brown skin into its steaming pink flesh he had characterized that animal contentment such as any clod might have, as happiness. Poor fool, he told himself now, he had not known the meaning of the word.
His day dreams had taken on a different color. His goal was always before him and this goal was represented by the hour when the machinery in the power and pump houses was running smoothly, when a head of water was flowing through the flume and sluice-boxes and the scrapers were handling 1000 cubic yards a day. As he stared through the window at the flying landscape he saw, not the orchards and wheat fields of the great state of Washington, but quicksilverlying thick with amalgam behind the riffles and the scales sagging with precious, yellow, honey-combed chunks of gold still hot from the retort.
Sometimes he found himself anticipating the moment when he should be telegraphing the amount of the clean-up to Helen Dunbar, to Harrah, and to Harrah’s good-naturedly pessimistic friends. Bruce ransacked his brain for somebody in the world to envy, but there was no one.
He had gone directly to the river from the East, taking a surveyor with him, and as soon as his application for the water-right in Big Squaw creek had been granted he got a crew together composed chiefly of the magnates from Ore City who, owing to Dill’s failure to take up the options, found themselves still at leisure and the financial depression unrelieved.
Ore City nursed a grievance against Dill that was some sorer than a carbuncle and it relieved its feelings by inventing punishments should he ever return to the camp which in ingenuity rivalled the tortures of the Inquisition. Bruce, too, often speculated concerning Dill, for it looked as though he had purposely betrayed Sprudell’s interest. Certainly a man of his mining experience knew better than to make locations in the snow and to pass assessment work which was obviously inadequate. From Sprudell, Bruce had heard nothing and engrossed in his new activities all but forgot him and his treachery, his insults and mysterious threats of vengeance.
Before leaving for the Pacific coast to buy machinery, Bruce had mapped out for the crew the work to be done in his absence and now, upon his return, he found great changes had come to the quiet bar on the river. There was a kitchen where Toy reigned,an arbitrary monarch, and a long bunk-house built of lumber sawed by an old-fashioned water-wheel which itself had been laboriously whip-sawed from heavy logs. Across the river the men were straining and lifting and tugging on the green timbers for the 500 feet of trestle which the survey demanded in order to get the 200-feet head that was necessary to develop the 250 horse-power needed for the pumps and scrapers.
Bruce was not long in exchanging the clothes of civilization for the recognized uniform of the miner, and in flannel shirt and overalls he toiled side by side with Porcupine Jim, Lannigan and the other local celebrities on his pay-roll, who by heroic exertions were pushing the trestle foot by foot across Big Squaw creek.
The position of General Manager as Bruce interpreted it was no sinecure. A General Manager who worked was an anomaly, something unheard of in the district where the title carried with it the time-honored prerogative of sitting in the shade issuing orders, sustained and soothed by an unfailing supply of liquid refreshment.
And while the crew wondered, they criticised—not through any lack of regard for Bruce but merely from habit and the secret belief that whatever he did they could have done better. In their hours of relaxation it was their wont to go over his plans for working the ground, so far as they knew them, and explain to each other carefully and in detail how it was impossible for Bruce with the kind of a “rig” he was putting in, to handle enough dirt to wash out a breast-pin. Yet they toiled none the less faithfully for thesedispiriting conversations, doing the work of horses, often to the point of exhaustion.
When the trestle was well along Bruce commenced sawing lumber for the half mile of flume which was to bring the water from the head-gate across the trestle to the pressure-box above the power-house. He sawed in such frenzy of haste—for there was so much to do and so little time to do it in—and with such concentration that when he raised his eyes the air seemed full of two by fours, and bottoms. When he closed them at night he saw “inch stuff,” and bottoms. When he dreamed, it was of saw-logs, battens and bottoms.
Spring came unmistakably and Bruce waited anxiously for word from Jennings that the repairs had been made and the machinery was on its way to Meadows—the mountain town one hundred and fifty miles above where the barges would be built and loaded for their hazardous journey.
As the sun grew stronger daily Bruce began to watch the river with increasing anxiety. He wondered if he had made it clear to Jennings that delay, the difference of a week, might mean a year’s postponement. The period nearest approaching safety was when the river was at the middle stage of the spring rise—about eight feet above low water. After it had passed this point only the utterly foolhardy would have attempted it.
Bruce’s nerves were at a tension as the days went by and he saw the great green snake swelling with the coming of warmer weather. Inch by inch the water crept up the sides of “Old Turtle-back,” the huge glazed rock that rose defiantly, splitting the current in the middle. A few hot suns would melt the snowbanksin the mountains to send the river thundering between its banks until the very earth trembled, and its navigation was unthinkable.
The telegram came finally, and Bruce’s relief was so great that, as little as he liked him, he could almost have embraced Smaltz, the man who brought the news that the machinery was boxed and on its way to Meadows.
“Thank God,thatworry’s over!” Bruce ejaculated as he read it, and Smaltz lingered. “I may get a night’s sleep now instead of lying awake listening to the river.”
“Oh, the machinery’s started?”
Bruce had an impression that he already knew the contents of the telegram in spite of his air of innocence and his question.
“Yes,” he nodded briefly.
“Say,—me and Porcupine Jim been talkin’ it over and wonderin’ if we’d pay our own way around so it wouldn’t cost the Company nothin’, if you’d let us come down with a boat from Meadows?”
“Can you handle a sweep?”
“Can I?” Smaltz sniggered. “Try me!”
Bruce looked at him a moment before he answered. He was wondering why the very sight of Smaltz irritated him. He was the only man of the crew that he disliked thoroughly. His boastful speech, his swaggering walk, a veiled insolence in his eyes and manner made Bruce itch to send him up the hill for good, but since Smaltz was unquestionably the best all-round man he had, he would not allow himself to be influenced by his personal prejudices. While he boasted he had yet to fail to make good his boastings and the tattered credentials he had displayed when he hadasked for work were of the best. When he asserted now that he could handle a sweep it was fairly certain that he could not only handle one but handle it well. Porcupine Jim, Bruce knew, had had some experience, so there was no good reason why he should not let them go since they were anxious.
“I’ve engaged the front sweepman for the other two boats,” Bruce said finally, “but if you and Jim want to take a hind sweep each and will promise to obey orders I guess there’s no objection.”
“Surest thing you know,” Smaltz answered in the fresh tone that rasped Bruce. “An’ much obliged. Anything to git a chanst to shoot them rapids. I’d do it if I wasn’t gittin’ nothin’ out of it just for the fun of it.”
“It won’t look like fun to me with all I’ll have at stake,” said Bruce soberly.
“Aw—don’t worry—we kin cut her.” Smaltz tossed the assurance back airily as he walked away, looking sharply to the right and left over his shoulder. It was a habit he had, Bruce often had noticed it, along with a fashion of stepping quickly around corners, peering and craning his neck as if perpetually on the alert for something or somebody. “You act like some feller that’s ‘done time’—or orter. I’ll bet a hundred to one you know how to make horsehair bridles,” Woods, the carpenter, had once told him pointedly, and the criticism had voiced Bruce’s own thoughts.
In the mail which Smaltz had brought down from Ore City was a letter from Helen Dunbar. It was the second he had had and he told himself as he tore it open eagerly that it had come none too soon, for the first one was well nigh worn out. He could not getover the surprise of discovering how many readings three or four pages of scraggly handwriting will stand without loss of interest.
Now, as he tried to grasp it all in a glance, the friendliness of it, the confidence and encouragement it contained made him glow. But at the end there was a paragraph which startled him—always the fly in the ointment—that gave rise to a vague uneasiness he could not immediately shake off.
“I ran up to the city one day last week,” the paragraph read, “and who do you suppose I saw with Winfield Harrah in the lobby of the Hotel Strathmore? You would never guess. None other than our versatile friend T. Victor Sprudell!”
How did they meet? For what purpose had Sprudell sought Harrah’s acquaintance? It troubled as well as puzzled Bruce for he could not think the meeting an accident because even he could see that Harrah and Sprudell moved in widely different stratas of society.
XVIIIProphets of Evil
XVIIIProphets of Evil
The difference between success and failure is sometimes only a hair’s breadth, the turning of a hand, and although the man who loses is frequently as deserving of commendation as the man who wins he seldom receives it, and Bruce knew that this would be particularly true of his attempt to shoot the dangerous rapids of the river with heavily loaded boats. If he accomplished the feat he would be lauded as a marvel of nerve and skill and shrewdness, if he failed he would be known in the terse language of Meadows as “One crazy damn fool.”
While the more conservative citizens of the mountain towns refrained from publicly expressing their thoughts, a coterie known as the “Old Timers” left him in no doubt as to their own opinion of the attempt. Each day they came to the river bank as regularly as though they had office-hours and stationed themselves on a pile of lumber near where Bruce caulked and tarred the seams of the three boats which were to make the first trip through the rapids. They made Bruce think of so many ancient ravens, as they roosted in a row croaking disaster. By the time the machinery was due to arrive they spoke of the wreck of the boats as something foreordained and settled. They differed only as to where it would happen.
“I really doubts, Burt, if you so much as git through the Pine-Crick rapids.”
“No?”
“I mind the time Jake Hazlett and his crew was drowned at the ‘Wild Goose.’ It seems the coroner was already there a settin’ on a corp’ that had come up in the eddy. ‘Go on through, boys!’ he hollers to ’em, ‘I’ll wait for you down below. It’ll save me another trip from Medders’.”
Bruce worked on, apparently unperturbed by these discouraging reminiscences.
“They say they’s a place down there where the river’s so narrow it’s bent over,” volunteered a third pessimist, as he cut an artistic initial in a plank with the skill of long practice. “And you’ll go through the Black Canyon like a bat out o’ hell. But I has no notion whatsoever that you’ll ever come up when you hits that waterfall on the other end. When her nose dips under, heavy-loaded like that, she’ll sink and fill right thar. Why—”
“Do you rickolect,” quavered a spry young cub of eighty-two who talked of the Civil War and the Nez Perce uprising as though they were the events of yesterday, “do you remember the time ‘Death-on-the-Trail’ lost his hull outfit tryin’ to git through the ‘Devil’s Teeth’? The idee of an old feller like him startin’ out alone! Why he was all of seventy.”
“An’ the time ‘Starvation Bill’ turned over at Proctors’s Falls?” chortled another. “Fritz Yandell said the river was full of grub—cracker cans, prunes and the like o’ that, for clost to a week. I never grieved much to hear of an accident to him for we’d had a railroad in here twenty years ago if it hadn’t been for Bill. The survey outfit took him along for helper and he et up all the grub, so the Injin guide quit ’em cold and they couldn’t go on. I allus hoped he’d starve to death somm’eres, but aftera spell of sickness from swallerin’ a ham-bone, he died tryin’ to eat six dozen aigs on a bet.”
“Talkin’ of Fritz Yandell—he told me he fished him a compass and transit out’n the river after them Governmint Yellow-Legs wrecked on Butcher’s Bar.” The speaker added cheerfully: “Since the Whites come into the country I reckon all told you could count the boats that’s got through without trouble on the fingers of one hand. If these boats was goin’ empty I’d say ‘all right—you’re liable to make it,’ but sunk deep in the water with six or eight thousand pounds—Burt, you orter have your head examined.”
But Bruce refused to let himself think of accident. He knew water, he could handle a sweep; he meant to take every precaution and he could, hemustget through.
The river was rising rapidly now, not an inch at a time but inches, for the days were warmer—warm enough to start rivulets running from sheltered snowbanks in the mountains. Daily the distance increased from shore to shore. Sprawling trees, driftwood, carcasses, the year’s rubbish from draws and gulches, swept by on the broad bosom of the yellow flood. The half-submerged willows were bending in the current and water-mark after water-mark disappeared on the bridge piles.
Bruce had not realized that the days of waiting had stretched his nerves to such a tension until he learned that the freight had really come. He felt for a moment as though the burdens of the world had been suddenly rolled from his shoulders. His relief was short-lived. It changed to consternation when he saw the last of the machinery piled upon the bank for loading. It weighed not fifty thousand poundsbut all of ninety—nearer a hundred! Dumfounded for the moment, he did not see how he could take it. The saving that he had made on the purchase price was eaten up by the extra weight owing to the excessive freight rates from the coast and on the branch line to Meadows. More than that, Jennings had disobeyed his explicit orders to box the smaller parts of each machine together. All had been thrown in the car helter-skelter.
Not since he had raged at “Slim” had Bruce been so furious, but there was little time to indulge his temper for there was now an extra boat to build upon which he must trust Smaltz as front sweepman.
They all worked early and late, building the extra barge, dividing the weight and loading the unwieldy machinery, but the best they could do, counting four boats to a trip instead of three, each barge drew from eight to twelve inches of water.
Though he gave no outward sign and went on stubbornly, the undertaking under such conditions—even to Bruce—looked foolhardy, while the croakings of the “Old Timers” rose to a wail of lamentation.
The last nail was driven and the last piece loaded and Bruce and his boatmen stood on the banks at dusk looking at the four barges, securely tied with bow and stern lines riding on the rising flood. Thirty-seven feet long they were, five feet high, eight feet wide while the sweeps were of two young fir trees over six inches in diameter and twenty feet in length. A twelve foot plank formed the blade which was bolted obliquely to one end and the whole balanced on a pin. They were clumsy looking enough, these flat-bottomed barges, but the only type of boat that could ride the rough water and skim the rocks so menacingly close to the surface.
“There’s nothin’ left to do now but say our prayers.” Smaltz’s jocularity broke the silence.
“My wife hasn’t quit snifflin’ since she heard the weight I was goin’ to take,” said Saunders, the boatman upon whom Bruce counted most. “If I hadn’t promised I don’t know as I’d take the risk. I wouldn’t, as it is, for anybody else, but I know what it means to you.”
“And I sure hate to ask it,” said Bruce answered gravely. “If anything happens I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Well—we can only do the best we can—and hope,” said Saunders. “The water’s as near right as it ever will be; and I wouldn’t worry if it wasn’t for the load.”
“To-morrow at eight, boys, and be prompt. Every hour is counting from now on, with two more trips to make.”
Bruce walked slowly up the street and went to his room, too tired and depressed for conversation down below. The weigh-bill from the station-agent was even worse than he had expected; and the question which he asked himself over and over was whether Jennings’s under-estimation of the weight was deliberate misrepresentation or bad figuring? Whatever the cause the costly error had shaken his faith in Jennings.
Bruce was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. The last thing he remembered was Smaltz’s raucous voice in the bar-room below boasting of the wicked rapids he had shot in the tumultuous “Colo-rady” and on the Stikine in the far north.
The noise of the bar-room ceased at an early hour and the little mountain town grew quiet but Brucewas not conscious of the change. It was midnight—and long past—well toward morning when in the sleep which had been so profound he heard his mother calling, calling in the same dear, sweet way that she used to call him when, tired out with following his father on long rides, he had overslept in the morning.
“Bruce! Bruce-boy! Up-adaisy!”
He stirred uneasily and imagined that he answered.
The voice came again and there was pleading in the shrill, staccato notes:
“Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!”
The cry from dreamland roused his consciousness at last. He sat up startled. There was no thought in his mind but the boats—the boats! In seconds, not minutes, he was in his clothes and stumbling down the dark stairway. There was something ghostly in the hollow echo of his footsteps on the plank sidewalk as he ran through the main street of the still village.
He saw that one boat was gone from its mooring before he reached the bank! He could see plainly the space where it had been. The other boats were safe—but the fourth—. He stopped short on the bank for one brief second weak with relief. The fourth barge, which was holding it temporarily. The water by some miracle it had jammed against the third barge which was holding it temporarily. The water was slapping against the side that was turned to the stream and the other was bumping, bumping against the stern of the third boat but the loose barge was working a little closer to the current with each bump. A matter of five minutes more at the most and it would have been started on its journey to destruction.
Bruce sprang to the stern of the third barge anddragged the loose bow-line from the water. It was shorter by many feet—the stout, new rope had been cut! It was not necessary to strike a match—the starlight was sufficient to show him that. He stared at it, unable to credit his own eyes. He scrambled over the machinery to the stern. The stern-line was the same—cut square and clean. If further evidence was needed, it was furnished by the severed portion, which was still tied around a bush.
There was no more sleep for Bruce that night. Bewildered, dumfounded by the discovery, he rolled himself in a “tarp” and laid down on the boat’s platform. So far as he knew he had not an enemy in the town. There seemed absolutely no reasonable explanation for the act.
XIXAt the Big Mallard
XIXAt the Big Mallard
The sun rose the next morning upon an eventful day in Bruce’s life. He was backing his judgment—or was it only his mulish obstinacy?—against the conviction of the community. He knew that if it had not been for their personal friendship for himself the married men among his boatmen would have backed out. There was excitement and tension in the air.
The wide, yellow river was running like a mill-race, bending the willows, lapping hungrily at the crumbling shore. The bank was black with groups of people, tearful wives and whimpering children, lugubrious neighbors, pessimistic citizens. Bruce called the men together and assigned each boat its place in line. Beyond explicit orders that no boatman should attempt to pass another and the barges must be kept a safe distance apart, he gave few instructions, for they had only to follow his lead.
“But if you see I’m in trouble, follow Saunders, who’s second. And, Jim, do exactly as Smaltz tells you—you’ll be on the hind sweep in the third boat with him.”
In addition to a head and hind sweepman each barge carried a bailer, for there were rapids where at any stage of the water a boat partially filled. The men now silently took their places and Bruce on his platform gripped the sweep-handle and nodded—
“Cast off.”
The barge drifted a little distance slowly, then faster; the current caught it and it started on itsjourney like some great swift-swimming bird. As he glided into the shadow of the bridge Saunders started; before he turned the bend Smaltz was waving his farewells, and as Meadows vanished from his sight the fourth boat, the heaviest loaded, was on its way. Bruce drew a deep breath, rest was behind him, the next three days would be hours of almost continual anxiety and strain.
The forenoon of the first day was comparatively easy going, though there were places enough for an amateur to wreck; but the real battle with the river began at the Pine Creek Rapids—the battle that no experienced boatman ever was rash enough to prophesy the result. The sinister stream, with its rapids and whirlpools, its waterfalls and dangerous channel-rocks, had claimed countless victims in the old days of the gold rush and there were years together since the white people had settled at Meadows that no boat had gone even a third of its length. Wherever the name of the river was known its ill-fame went with it, and those feared it most who knew it best. Only the inexperienced, those too unfamiliar with water to recognize its perils so long as nothing happened, spoke lightly of its dangers.
Above the Pine Creek Rapids, Bruce swung into an eddy to tie up for lunch; besides, he wanted to see how Smaltz handled his sweep. Smaltz came on, grinning, and Porcupine Jim, bare-headed, his yellow pompadour shining in the sun like corn-silk, responded instantly to every order with a stroke. They were working together perfectly, Bruce noted with relief, and the landing Smaltz made in the eddy was quite as good as the one he had made himself.
Once more Bruce had to admit that if Smaltzboasted he always made good his boast. He believed there was little doubt but that he was equal to the work.
An ominous roar was coming from the rapids, a continuous rumble like thunder far back in the hills. It was not the most cheerful sound by which to eat and the meal was brief. The gravity of the boatmen who knew the river was contagious and the grin faded gradually from Smaltz’s face.
Life preservers were dragged out within easy reach, the sweepmen replaced their boots with rubber-soled canvas ties and cleared their platform of every nail and splinter. When all were ready, Bruce swung off his hat and laid both hands upon his sweep.
“Throw off the lines,” he said quietly and his black eyes took on a steady shine.
There was something creepy, portentous, in the seemingly deliberate quietness with which the boat crept from the still water of the eddy toward the channel.
The bailer in the stern changed color and no one spoke. There was an occasional ripple against the side of the boat but save for that distant roar no other sound broke the strained stillness. Bruce crouched over his sweep like some huge cat, a cougar waiting to grapple with an enemy as wily and as formidable as himself. The boat slipped forward with a kind of stealth and then the current caught it.
Faster it moved, then faster and faster. The rocks and bushes at the water’s edge flew by. The sound was now a steady boom! boom! growing louder with every heart-beat, until it was like the indescribable roar of a cloudburst in a canyon—an avalanche of water dropping from a great height.
The boat was racing now with a speed which made the flying rocks and foliage along the shore a blur—racing toward a white stretch of churning spray and foam that reached as far down the river as it was possible to see. From the water which dashed itself to whiteness against the rocks there still came the mighty boom! boom! which had put fear into many a heart.
The barge was leaping toward it as though drawn by the invisible force of some great suction pump. The hind sweepman gripped the handle of the sweep until his knuckles went white and Bruce over his shoulder watched the wild water with a jaw set and rigid.
The heavy barge seemed to pause for an instant on the edge of a precipice with half her length in mid-air before her bow dropped heavily into a curve of water that was like the hollow of a great green shell. The roar that followed was deafening. The sheet of water that broke over the boat for an instant shut out the sun. Then she came up like a clumsy Newfoundland, with the water streaming from the platform and swishing through the machinery, and all on board drenched to the skin.
Bruce stood at his post unshaken, throwing his great strength on the sweep this way and that—endeavoring to keep it in the centre of the current—in the middle of the tortuous channel through which the boat was racing like mad. And the hind-sweepman, doing his part, responded, with all the weight of body and strength he possessed, to Bruce’s low-voiced orders almost before they had left his lips.
Quick and tremendous action was imperative for there were places where a single instant’s tardinessmeant destruction. There was no time in that mad rush to rectify mistakes. A miscalculation, a stroke of the sweep too little or too much, would send the heavily loaded boat with that tremendous, terrifying force behind it, crashing and splintering on a rock like a flimsy-bottomed strawberry box.
For all of seven miles Bruce never lifted his eyes, straining them as he wielded his sweep for the deceptive, submerged granite boulders over which the water slid in a thin sheet. Immovable, tense, he steered with the sureness of knowledge and grim determination until the boat ceased to leap and ahead lay a little stretch of peace.
Then he turned and looked at the lolling tongues behind him that seemed still reaching for the boat and straightening up he shook his fist:
“You didn’t get me that time, dog-gone you, and what’s more you won’t!”
All three boats were coming, rearing and plunging, disappearing and reappearing. Anxiously he watched Smaltz work until a bend of the river shut them all from sight. It was many miles before the river straightened out again but when it did he saw them all riding safely, with Smaltz holding his place in line.
Stretches of white water came at frequent intervals all day but Bruce slept on the platform of his barge that night more soundly than he ever had dared hope. Each hour that passed, each rapid that they put behind them, was so much done; he was so much nearer his goal.
On the second night when they tied up, with the Devil’s Teeth, the Black Canyon and the Whiplash passed in safety, Bruce felt almost secure, although therapid that he dreaded most remained for the third and last day.
The boatmen stood, a silent group, at The Big Mallard. “She’s a bad one, boys—and looking wicked as I’ve ever seen her.” There was a furrow of anxiety between Bruce’s heavy brows.
Every grave face was a shade paler and Porcupine Jim’s eyes looked like two blue buttons sewed on white paper as he stared.
“I wish I was back in Meennyso-ta.” The unimaginative Swede’s voice was plaintive.
“We dare not risk the other channel, Saunders,” said Bruce briefly, “the water’s hardly up enough for that.”
“I don’t believe we could make it,” Saunders answered; “it’s too long a chance.”
Smaltz was studying the rocks and current intently, as though to impress upon his mind every twist and turn. His face was serious but he made no comment and walked back in silence to the eddy above where the boats were tied.
It was the only rapid where they had stopped to “look out the trail ahead,” but a peculiarity of the Big Mallard was that the channel changed with the varying stages of the water and it was too dangerous at any stage to trust to luck.
It was a stretch of water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless—inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the shore it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallardwas the supreme test of courage and boatmanship.
The river, running like a mill-race, shot straight and smooth down grade until it reached a high, sharp, jutting ledge of granite, where it made a sharp turn. The main current made a close swirl and then fairly leaping took a sudden rush for a narrow passageway between two great boulders, one of which rose close to shore and the other nearer the centre of the river. The latter being covered thinly with a sheet of water which shot over it to drop into a dark hole like a well, rising again to strike another rock immediately below and curve back. For three hundred yards or more the river seethed and boiled, a stretch of roaring whiteness, as though its growing fury had culminated in this foaming fit of rage, and from it came uncanny sounds like children crying, women screaming.
Bruce’s eyes were shining brilliantly with the excitement of the desperate game ahead when he put into the river, but nothing could exceed the carefulness, the caution with which he worked his boat out of the eddy so that when the current caught it it should catch it right. Watching the landmarks on either shore, measuring distances, calculating the consequences of each stroke, he placed the clumsy barge where he would have it, with all the accurate skill of a good billiard player making a shot.
The boat reached the edge of the current; then it caught it full. With a jump like a race-horse at the signal it was shooting down the toboggan slide of water toward the jutting granite ledge. The blanched bailer in the stern could have touched it with his hand as the boat whipped around the corner, clearing it by sosmall a margin that it seemed to him his heart stood still.
Bruce’s muscles turned to steel as he gripped the sweep handle for the last mad rush. He looked the personification of human daring. The wind blew his hair straight back. The joy of battle blazed in his eyes. His face was alight with a reckless exultation. But powerful, fearless as he was, it did not seem as though it were within the range of human skill or possibilities to place a boat in that toboggan slide of water so that it would cut the current diagonally, miss the rock nearest shore and shoot across to miss the channel boulder and that yawning hole beneath. But he did, though he skimmed the wide-mouthed well so close that the bailer stared into its dark depths with bulging eyes.
The boat leaped in the spray below, but the worst was passed and Bruce and his hind sweepman exchanged the swift smile of satisfaction which men have for each other at such a time.
“Keep her steady—straight away.” He had not dared yet to lift his eyes to look behind save for that one glance.
“My God! they’re comin’ right together!”
The sharp cry from the hind sweepman made him turn. They had rounded the ledge abreast and Smaltz’s boat inside was crowding Saunders hard. Saunders and his helper were working with superhuman strength to throw the boat into the outer channel in the fraction of time before it started on the final shoot. Could they do it! could they! Bruce felt his lungs—his heart—something inside him hurt with his sharp intake of breath as he watched thatdesperate battle whose loss meant not only sunk machinery but very likely death.
Bruce’s hands were still full getting his own boat to safety. He dared not look too long behind.
“They’re goin’ to make it! They’re almost through! They’re safe!” Then—shrilly—“They’re gone! they’ve lost a sweep.”
Bruce turned quickly at his helper’s cry of consternation, turned to see the hind-sweep wildly threshing the air while the boat spun around and around in the boiling water, disappearing, reappearing, sinking a little lower with each plunge. Then, at the risk of having every rib crushed in, they saw the bailer throw his body across the sweep and hold it down before it quite leaped from its pin. The hind-sweepman was scrambling wildly to reach and hold the handle as it beat the air. He got it—held it for a second—then it was wrenched out of his hand. He tried again and again before he held it, but finally Bruce said huskily——
“They’ll make it—they’ll make it sure if Saunders can hold her a little longer off the rocks.”
His own boat had reached quieter water. Simultaneously, it seemed, both he and his helper thought of Smaltz. They took their eyes from the boat in trouble and the hind-sweepman’s jaw dropped. He said unemotionally—dully—as he might have said—“I’m sick; I’m hungry”—“They’ve struck.”
Yes—they had struck. If Bruce had not been so absorbed he might have heard the bottom splintering when she hit the rock.
Her bow shot high into the air and settled at the stern. As she slid off, tilted, filled and sunk, Smaltz and Porcupine Jim both jumped. Then theriver made a bend which shut it all from Bruce’s sight. It was half a mile before he found a landing. He tied up and walked back, unexcited, not hurrying, with a curious quietness inside.
Smaltz and Jim were fighting when he got there. Smaltz was sitting astride the latter’s chest. There were epithets and recriminations, accusations, counter-charges, oaths. The Swede was crying and a little stream of red was trickling toward his ear. Bruce eyed him calmly, contemplatively, thinking what a face he made, and how ludicrous he looked with the sand matted in his corn-silk hair and covering him like a tamale casing of corn-meal as it stuck to his wet clothes.
He left them and walked up the river where the rock rose like a monument to his hopes. With his hands on his hips he watched the water rippling around it, slipping over the spot where the boat lay buried with some portion of every machine upon the works while like a bolt from the blue the knowledge came to him that since the old Edison type was obsolete the factories no longer made duplicates of the parts.