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 after a 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, he must get 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 pounds but 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 Bruce was 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 and dragged 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.
* * *
XIX
At 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 its journey 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 Smaltz boasted 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 tardiness meant 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 the rapid 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 Mallard was 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.
The Man from the Bitter Roots Page 18