Джек Лондон
Smoke Bellew
In the morning, stiff from his labours and numb with the frost, he rolled out of the canvas, ate a couple of pounds of uncooked bacon, buckled the straps on a hundred pounds, and went down the rocky way. Several hundred yards beneath, the trail led across a small glacier and down to Crater Lake. Other men packed across the glacier. All that day he dropped his packs at the glacier’s upper edge, and, by virtue of the shortness of the pack, he put his straps on one hundred and fifty pounds each load. His astonishment at being able to do it never abated. For two dollars he bought from an Indian three leathery sea-biscuits, and out of these, and a huge quantity of raw bacon, made several meals. Unwashed, unwarmed, his clothing wet with sweat, he slept another night in the canvas.
In the early morning he spread a tarpaulin on the ice, loaded it with three-quarters of a ton, and started to pull. Where the pitch of the glacier accelerated, his load likewise accelerated, overran him, scooped him in on top, and ran away with him.
A hundred packers, bending under their loads, stopped to watch him. He yelled frantic warnings, and those in his path stumbled and staggered clear. Below, on the lower edge of the glacier, was pitched a small tent, which seemed leaping toward him, so rapidly did it grow larger. He left the beaten track where the packers’ trail swerved to the left, and struck a patch of fresh snow. This arose about him in frosty smoke, while it reduced his speed. He saw the tent the instant he struck it, carrying away the corner guys, bursting in the front flaps, and fetching up inside, still on top of the tarpaulin and in the midst of his grub-sacks. The tent rocked drunkenly, and in the frosty vapour he found himself face to face with a startled young woman who was sitting up in her blankets – the very one who had called him a tenderfoot at Dyea.
“Did you see my smoke?” he queried cheerfully.
She regarded him with disapproval.
“Talk about your magic carpets!” he went on.
“Do you mind removing that sack from my foot?” she said coldly.
He looked, and lifted his weight quickly.
“It wasn’t a sack. It was my elbow. Pardon me.”
The information did not perturb her, and her coolness was a challenge.
“It was a mercy you did not overturn the stove,” she said.
He followed her glance and saw a sheet-iron stove and a coffee-pot, attended by a young squaw. He sniffed the coffee and looked back to the girl.
“I’m a chechako,” he said.
Her bored expression told him that he was stating the obvious. But he was unabashed.
“I’ve shed my shooting-irons,” he added.
Then she recognized him, and her eyes lighted. “I never thought you’d get this far,” she informed him.
Again, and greedily, he sniffed the air. “As I live, coffee!” He turned and directly addressed her: “I’ll give you my little finger – cut it right off now; I’ll do anything; I’ll be your slave for a year and a day or any other old time, if you’ll give me a cup out of that pot.”
And over the coffee he gave his name and learned hers – Joy Gastell. Also, he learned that she was an old-timer in the country. She had been born in a trading-post on the Great Slave, and as a child had crossed the Rockies with her father and come down to the Yukon. She was going in, she said, with her father, who had been delayed by business in Seattle, and who had then been wrecked on the ill-fated Chanter and carried back to Puget Sound by the rescuing steamer.
In view of the fact that she was still in her blankets, he did not make it a long conversation, and, heroically declining a second cup of coffee, he removed himself and his heaped and shifted baggage from her tent. Further, he took several conclusions away with him: she had a fetching name and fetching eyes; could not be more than twenty, or twenty-one or – two; her father must be French; she had a will of her own and temperament to burn; and she had been educated elsewhere than on the frontier.
Over the ice-scoured rocks and above the timber-line, the trail ran around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy Camp and the first scrub-pines. To pack his heavy outfit around would take days of heart-breaking toil. On the lake was a canvas boat employed in freighting. Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him and his ton across. But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty dollars a ton.
“You’ve got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat,” Kit said to the ferryman. “Do you want another gold-mine?”
“Show me,” was the answer.
“I’ll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit. It’s an idea, not patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it. Are you game?”
The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks.
“Very well. You see that glacier. Take a pick-axe and wade into it. In a day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom. See the point? The Chilkoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation, Limited. You can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day, and have no work to do but collect the coin.”
Two hours later, Kit’s ton was across the lake, and he had gained three days on himself. And when John Bellew overtook him, he was well along toward Deep Lake, another volcanic pit filled with glacial water.
The last pack, from Long Lake to Linderman, was three miles, and the trail, if trail it could be called, rose up over a thousand-foot hogback, dropped down a scramble of slippery rocks, and crossed a wide stretch of swamp. John Bellew remonstrated when he saw Kit arise with a hundred pounds in the straps and pick up a fifty-pound sack of flour and place it on top of the pack against the back of his neck.
“Come on, you chunk of the hard,” Kit retorted. “Kick in on your bear-meat fodder and your one suit of underclothes.”
But John Bellew shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m getting old, Christopher.”
“You’re only forty-eight. Do you realize that my grandfather, sir, your father, old Isaac Bellew, killed a man with his fist when he was sixty-nine years old?”
John Bellew grinned and swallowed his medicine.
“Avuncular, I want to tell you something important. I was raised a Lord Fauntleroy, but I can outpack you, outwalk you, put you on your back, or lick you with my fists right now.”
John Bellew thrust out his hand and spoke solemnly. “Christopher, my boy, I believe you can do it. I believe you can do it with that pack on your back at the same time. You’ve made good, boy, though it’s too unthinkable to believe.”
Kit made the round trip of the last pack four times a day, which is to say that he daily covered twenty-four miles of mountain climbing, twelve miles of it under one hundred and fifty pounds. He was proud, hard, and tired, but in splendid physical condition. He ate and slept as he had never eaten and slept in his life, and as the end of the work came in sight, he was almost half sorry.
One problem bothered him. He had learned that he could fall with a hundred-weight on his back and survive; but he was confident, if he fell with that additional fifty pounds across the back of his neck, that it would break it clean. Each trail through the swamp was quickly churned bottomless by the thousands of packers, who were compelled continually to make new trails. It was while pioneering such a new trail, that he solved the problem of the extra fifty.
The soft, lush surface gave way under him; he floundered, and pitched forward on his face. The fifty pounds crushed his face in the mud and went clear without snapping his neck. With the remaining hundred pounds on his back, he arose on hands and knees. But he got no farther. One arm sank to the shoulder, pillowing his cheek in the slush. As he drew this arm clear, the other sank to the shoulder. In this position it was impossible to slip the straps, and the hundred-weight on his back would not let him rise. On hands and knees, sinking first one arm and then the other, he made an effort to crawl to where the small sack of flour had fallen. But he exhausted himself without advancing, and so churned and broke the grass surface, that a tiny pool of water began to form in perilous proximity to his mouth and nose.
He tried to throw himself on his back with the pack underneath, but this resulted in sinking both arms to the shoulders and gave him a foretaste of drowning. With exquisite patience, he slowly withdrew one sucking arm and then the other and rested them flat on the surface for the support of his chin. Then he began to call for help. After a time he heard the sound of feet sucking through the mud as some one advanced from behind.
“Lend a hand, friend,” he said. “Throw out a life-line or something.”
It was a woman’s voice that answered, and he recognized it.
“If you’ll unbuckle the straps I can get up.”
The hundred pounds rolled into the mud with a soggy noise, and he slowly gained his feet.
“A pretty predicament,” Miss Gastell laughed, at sight of his mud-covered face.
“Not at all,” he replied airily. “My favourite physical-exercise stunt. Try it some time. It’s great for the pectoral muscles and the spine.”
He wiped his face, flinging the slush from his hand with a snappy jerk.
“Oh!” she cried in recognition. “It’s Mr. – ah – Mr. Smoke Bellew.”
“I thank you gravely for your timely rescue and for that name,” he answered. “I have been doubly baptized. Henceforth I shall insist always on being called Smoke Bellew. It is a strong name, and not without significance.”
He paused, and then voice and expression became suddenly fierce.
“Do you know what I’m going to do?” he demanded. “I’m going back to the States. I am going to get married. I am going to raise a large family of children. And then, as the evening shadows fall, I shall gather those children about me and relate the sufferings and hardships I endured on the Chilkoot Trail. And if they don’t cry – I repeat, if they don’t cry, I’ll lambaste the stuffing out of them.”
The arctic winter came down apace. Snow that had come to stay lay six inches on the ground, and the ice was forming in quiet ponds, despite the fierce gales that blew. It was in the late afternoon, during a lull in such a gale, that Kit and John Bellew helped the cousins load the boat and watched it disappear down the lake in a snow-squall.
“And now a night’s sleep and an early start in the morning,” said John Bellew. “If we aren’t storm-bound at the summit we’ll make Dyea to-morrow night, and if we have luck in catching a steamer we’ll be in San Francisco in a week.”
“Enjoyed your vacation?” Kit asked absently.
Their camp for that last night at Linderman was a melancholy remnant. Everything of use, including the tent, had been taken by the cousins. A tattered tarpaulin, stretched as a wind-break, partially sheltered them from the driving snow. Supper they cooked on an open fire in a couple of battered and discarded camp utensils. All that was left them were their blankets, and food for several meals.
From the moment of the departure of the boat, Kit had become absent and restless. His uncle noticed his condition, and attributed it to the fact that the end of the hard toil had come. Only once during supper did Kit speak.
“Avuncular,” he said, relevant of nothing, “after this, I wish you’d call me Smoke. I’ve made some smoke on this trail, haven’t I?”
A few minutes later he wandered away in the direction of the village of tents that sheltered the gold-rushers who were still packing or building their boats. He was gone several hours, and when he returned and slipped into his blankets John Bellew was asleep.
In the darkness of a gale-driven morning, Kit crawled out, built a fire in his stocking feet, by which he thawed out his frozen shoes, then boiled coffee and fried bacon. It was a chilly, miserable meal. As soon as it was finished, they strapped their blankets. As John Bellew turned to lead the way toward the Chilcoot Trail, Kit held out his hand.
“Good-bye, avuncular,” he said.
John Bellew looked at him and swore in his surprise.
“Don’t forget, my name’s Smoke,” Kit chided.
“But what are you going to do?”
Kit waved his hand in a general direction northward over the storm-lashed lake.
“What’s the good of turning back after getting this far?” he asked. “Besides, I’ve got my taste of meat, and I like it. I’m going on.”
“You’re broke,” protested John Bellew. “You have no outfit.”
“I’ve got a job. Behold your nephew, Christopher Smoke Bellew! He’s got a job! He’s a gentleman’s man! He’s got a job at a hundred and fifty per month and grub. He’s going down to Dawson with a couple of dudes and another gentleman’s man – camp-cook, boatman, and general all-around hustler. And O’Hara and The Billow can go to the devil. Good-bye.”
But John Bellew was dazed, and could only mutter: “I don’t understand.”
“They say the baldface grizzlies are thick in the Yukon Basin,” Kit explained. “Well, I’ve got only one suit of underclothes, and I’m going after the bear-meat, that’s all.”
II. THE MEAT
Half the time the wind blew a gale, and Smoke Bellew staggered against it along the beach. In the gray of dawn a dozen boats were being loaded with the precious outfits packed across Chilkoot. They were clumsy, home-made boats, put together by men who were not boat-builders, out of planks they had sawed by hand from green spruce-trees. One boat, already loaded, was just starting, and Kit paused to watch.
The wind, which was fair down the lake, here blew in squarely on the beach, kicking up a nasty sea in the shallows. The men of the departing boat waded in high rubber boots as they shoved it out toward deeper water. Twice they did this. Clambering aboard and failing to row clear, the boat was swept back and grounded. Kit noticed that the spray on the sides of the boat quickly turned to ice. The third attempt was a partial success. The last two men to climb in were wet to their waists, but the boat was afloat. They struggled awkwardly at the heavy oars, and slowly worked off shore. Then they hoisted a sail made of blankets, had it carry away in a gust, and were swept a third time back on the freezing beach.
Kit grinned to himself and went on. This was what he must expect to encounter, for he, too, in his new role of gentleman’s man, was to start from the beach in a similar boat that very day.
Everywhere men were at work, and at work desperately, for the closing down of winter was so imminent that it was a gamble whether or not they would get across the great chain of lakes before the freeze-up. Yet, when Kit arrived at the tent of Messrs. Sprague and Stine, he did not find them stirring.
By a fire, under the shelter of a tarpaulin, squatted a short, thick man smoking a brown-paper cigarette.
“Hello,” he said. “Are you Mister Sprague’s new man?”
As Kit nodded, he thought he had noted a shade of emphasis on the MISTER and the MAN, and he was sure of a hint of a twinkle in the corner of the eye.
“Well, I’m Doc Stine’s man,” the other went on. “I’m five feet two inches long, and my name’s Shorty, Jack Short for short, and sometimes known as Johnny-on-the-Spot.”
Kit put out his hand and shook. “Were you raised on bear-meat?” he queried.
“Sure,” was the answer; “though my first feedin’ was buffalo-milk as near as I can remember. Sit down an’ have some grub. The bosses ain’t turned out yet.”
And despite the one breakfast, Kit sat down under the tarpaulin and ate a second breakfast thrice as hearty. The heavy, purging toil of weeks had given him the stomach and appetite of a wolf. He could eat anything, in any quantity, and be unaware that he possessed a digestion. Shorty he found voluble and pessimistic, and from him he received surprising tips concerning their bosses and ominous forecasts of the expedition. Thomas Stanley Sprague was a budding mining engineer and the son of a millionaire. Doctor Adolph Stine was also the son of a wealthy father. And, through their fathers, both had been backed by an investing syndicate in the Klondike adventure.
“Oh, they’re sure made of money,” Shorty expounded. “When they hit the beach at Dyea, freight was seventy cents, but no Indians. There was a party from Eastern Oregon, real miners, that’d managed to get a team of Indians together at seventy cents. Indians had the straps on the outfit, three thousand pounds of it, when along comes Sprague and Stine. They offered eighty cents and ninety, and at a dollar a pound the Indians jumped the contract and took off their straps. Sprague and Stine came through, though it cost them three thousand, and the Oregon bunch is still on the beach. They won’t get through till next year.
“Oh, they are real hummers, your boss and mine, when it comes to sheddin’ the mazuma an’ never mindin’ other folks’ feelin’s. What did they do when they hit Linderman? The carpenters was just putting in the last licks on a boat they’d contracted to a ‘Frisco bunch for six hundred. Sprague and Stine slipped ‘em an even thousand, and they jumped their contract. It’s a good-lookin’ boat, but it’s jiggered the other bunch. They’ve got their outfit right here, but no boat. And they’re stuck for next year.
“Have another cup of coffee, and take it from me that I wouldn’t travel with no such outfit if I didn’t want to get to Klondike so blamed bad. They ain’t hearted right. They’d take the crape off the door of a house in mourning if they needed it in their business. Did you sign a contract?”
Kit shook his head.
“Then I’m sorry for you, pardner. They ain’t no grub in the country, and they’ll drop you cold as soon as they hit Dawson. Men are going to starve there this winter.”
“They agreed – ” Kit began.
“Verbal,” Shorty snapped him short. “It’s your say-so against theirs, that’s all. Well, anyway, what’s your name, pardner?”
“Call me Smoke,” said Kit.
“Well, Smoke, you’ll have a run for your verbal contract just the same. This is a plain sample of what to expect. They can sure shed mazuma, but they can’t work, or turn out of bed in the morning. We should have been loaded and started an hour ago. It’s you an’ me for the big work. Pretty soon you’ll hear ‘em shoutin’ for their coffee – in bed, mind you, and them grown men. What d’ye know about boatin’ on the water? I’m a cowman and a prospector, but I’m sure tenderfooted on water, an’ they don’t know punkins. What d’ye know?”
“Search me,” Kit answered, snuggling in closer under the tarpaulin as the snow whirled before a fiercer gust. “I haven’t been on a small boat since a boy. But I guess we can learn.”
A corner of the tarpaulin tore loose, and Shorty received a jet of driven snow down the back of his neck.
“Oh, we can learn all right,” he muttered wrathfully. “Sure we can. A child can learn. But it’s dollars to doughnuts we don’t even get started to-day.”
It was eight o’clock when the call for coffee came from the tent, and nearly nine before the two employers emerged.
“Hello,” said Sprague, a rosy-cheeked, well-fed young man of twenty-five. “Time we made a start, Shorty. You and – ” Here he glanced interrogatively at Kit. “I didn’t quite catch your name last evening.”
“Smoke.”
“Well, Shorty, you and Mr. Smoke had better begin loading the boat.”
“Plain Smoke – cut out the Mister,” Kit suggested.
Sprague nodded curtly and strolled away among the tents, to be followed by Doctor Stine, a slender, pallid young man.
Shorty looked significantly at his companion. “Over a ton and a half of outfit, and they won’t lend a hand. You’ll see.”
“I guess it’s because we’re paid to do the work,” Kit answered cheerfully, “and we might as well buck in.”
To move three thousand pounds on the shoulders a hundred yards was no slight task, and to do it in half a gale, slushing through the snow in heavy rubber boots, was exhausting. In addition, there was the taking down of the tent and the packing of small camp equipage. Then came the loading. As the boat settled, it had to be shoved farther and farther out, increasing the distance they had to wade. By two o’clock it had all been accomplished, and Kit, despite his two breakfasts, was weak with the faintness of hunger. His knees were shaking under him. Shorty, in similar predicament, foraged through the pots and pans, and drew forth a big pot of cold boiled beans in which were imbedded large chunks of bacon. There was only one spoon, a long-handled one, and they dipped, turn and turn about, into the pot. Kit was filled with an immense certitude that in all his life he had never tasted anything so good.
“Lord, man,” he mumbled between chews, “I never knew what appetite was till I hit the trail.”
Sprague and Stine arrived in the midst of this pleasant occupation.
“What’s the delay?” Sprague complained. “Aren’t we ever going to get started?”
Shorty dipped in turn, and passed the spoon to Kit. Nor did either speak till the pot was empty and the bottom scraped.
“Of course we ain’t been doin’ nothing,” Shorty said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “We ain’t been doin’ nothing at all. And of course you ain’t had nothing to eat. It was sure careless of me.”
“Yes, yes,” Stine said quickly. “We ate at one of the tents – friends of ours.”
“Thought so,” Shorty grunted.
“But now that you’re finished, let us get started,” Sprague urged.
“There’s the boat,” said Shorty. “She’s sure loaded. Now, just how might you be goin’ about to get started?”
“By climbing aboard and shoving off. Come on.”
They waded out, and the employers got on board, while Kit and Shorty shoved clear. When the waves lapped the tops of their boots they clambered in. The other two men were not prepared with the oars, and the boat swept back and grounded. Half a dozen times, with a great expenditure of energy, this was repeated.
Shorty sat down disconsolately on the gunwale, took a chew of tobacco, and questioned the universe, while Kit baled the boat and the other two exchanged unkind remarks.
“If you’ll take my orders, I’ll get her off,” Sprague finally said.
The attempt was well intended, but before he could clamber on board he was wet to the waist.
“We’ve got to camp and build a fire,” he said, as the boat grounded again. “I’m freezing.”
“Don’t be afraid of a wetting,” Stine sneered. “Other men have gone off to-day wetter than you. Now I’m going to take her out.”
This time it was he who got the wetting and who announced with chattering teeth the need of a fire.
“A little splash like that!” Sprague chattered spitefully. “We’ll go on.”
“Shorty, dig out my clothes-bag and make a fire,” the other commanded.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Sprague cried.
Shorty looked from one to the other, expectorated, but did not move.
“He’s working for me, and I guess he obeys my orders,” Stine retorted. “Shorty, take that bag ashore.”
Shorty obeyed, and Sprague shivered in the boat. Kit, having received no orders, remained inactive, glad of the rest.
“A boat divided against itself won’t float,” he soliloquized.
“What’s that?” Sprague snarled at him.
“Talking to myself – habit of mine,” he answered.
His employer favoured him with a hard look, and sulked several minutes longer. Then he surrendered.
“Get out my bag, Smoke,” he ordered, “and lend a hand with that fire. We won’t get off till morning now.”
Next day the gale still blew. Lake Linderman was no more than a narrow mountain gorge filled with water. Sweeping down from the mountains through this funnel, the wind was irregular, blowing great guns at times and at other times dwindling to a strong breeze.
“If you give me a shot at it, I think I can get her off,” Kit said, when all was ready for the start.
“What do you know about it?” Stine snapped at him.
“Search me,” Kit answered, and subsided.
It was the first time he had worked for wages in his life, but he was learning the discipline of it fast. Obediently and cheerfully he joined in various vain efforts to get clear of the beach.
“How would you go about it?” Sprague finally half panted, half whined at him.
“Sit down and get a good rest till a lull comes in the wind, and then buck in for all we’re worth.”
Simple as the idea was, he had been the first to evolve it; the first time it was applied it worked, and they hoisted a blanket to the mast and sped down the lake. Stine and Sprague immediately became cheerful. Shorty, despite his chronic pessimism, was always cheerful, and Kit was too interested to be otherwise. Sprague struggled with the steering-sweep for a quarter of an hour, and then looked appealingly at Kit, who relieved him.
“My arms are fairly broken with the strain of it,” Sprague muttered apologetically.
“You never ate bear-meat, did you?” Kit asked sympathetically.
“What the devil do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing; I was just wondering.”
But behind his employer’s back Kit caught the approving grin of Shorty, who had already caught the whim of his metaphor.
Kit steered the length of Linderman, displaying an aptitude that caused both young men of money and disinclination for work to name him boat-steerer. Shorty was no less pleased, and volunteered to continue cooking and leave the boat work to the other.
Between Linderman and Lake Bennett was a portage. The boat, lightly loaded, was lined down the small but violent connecting stream, and here Kit learned a vast deal more about boats and water. But when it came to packing the outfit, Stine and Sprague disappeared, and their men spent two days of back-breaking toil in getting the outfit across. And this was the history of many miserable days of the trip – Kit and Shorty working to exhaustion, while their masters toiled not and demanded to be waited upon.
But the iron-bound arctic winter continued to close down, and they were held back by numerous and unavoidable delays. At Windy Arm, Stine arbitrarily dispossessed Kit of the steering-sweep and within the hour wrecked the boat on a wave-beaten lee shore. Two days were lost here in making repairs, and the morning of the fresh start, as they came down to embark, on stern and bow, in large letters, was charcoaled “The Chechako.”
Kit grinned at the appropriateness of the invidious word.
“Huh!” said Shorty, when accused by Stine. “I can sure read and spell, an’ I know that chechako means tenderfoot, but my education never went high enough to learn me to spell a jaw-breaker like that.”
Both employers looked daggers at Kit, for the insult rankled; nor did he mention that the night before, Shorty had besought him for the spelling of that particular word.
“That’s ‘most as bad as your bear-meat slam at ‘em,” Shorty confided later.
Kit chuckled. Along with the continuous discovery of his own powers had come an ever-increasing disapproval of the two masters. It was not so much irritation, which was always present, as disgust. He had got his taste of the meat, and liked it; but they were teaching him how not to eat it. Privily, he thanked God that he was not made as they. He came to dislike them to a degree that bordered on hatred. Their malingering bothered him less than their helpless inefficiency. Somewhere in him, old Isaac Bellew and all the rest of the hardy Bellews were making good.
“Shorty,” he said one day, in the usual delay of getting started, “I could almost fetch them a rap over the head with an oar and bury them in the river.”
“Same here,” Shorty agreed. “They’re not meat-eaters. They’re fish-eaters, and they sure stink.”
They came to the rapids; first, the Box Canyon, and, several miles below, the White Horse. The Box Canyon was adequately named. It was a box, a trap. Once in it, the only way out was through. On either side arose perpendicular walls of rock. The river narrowed to a fraction of its width and roared through this gloomy passage in a madness of motion that heaped the water in the center into a ridge fully eight feet higher than at the rocky sides. This ridge, in turn, was crested with stiff, upstanding waves that curled over yet remained each in its unvarying place. The Canyon was well feared, for it had collected its toll of dead from the passing goldrushers.
Tying to the bank above, where lay a score of other anxious boats, Kit and his companions went ahead on foot to investigate. They crept to the brink and gazed down at the swirl of water. Sprague drew back, shuddering.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “A swimmer hasn’t a chance in that.”
Shorty touched Kit significantly with his elbow and said in an undertone:
“Cold feet. Dollars to doughnuts they don’t go through.”
Kit scarcely heard. From the beginning of the boat trip he had been learning the stubbornness and inconceivable viciousness of the elements, and this glimpse of what was below him acted as a challenge. “We’ve got to ride that ridge,” he said. “If we get off it we’ll hit the walls.”
“And never know what hit us,” was Shorty’s verdict. “Can you swim, Smoke?”
“I’d wish I couldn’t if anything went wrong in there.”
“That’s what I say,” a stranger, standing alongside and peering down into the Canyon, said mournfully. “And I wish I were through it.”
“I wouldn’t sell my chance to go through,” Kit answered.
He spoke honestly, but it was with the idea of heartening the man. He turned to go back to the boat.
“Are you going to tackle it?” the man asked.
Kit nodded.
“I wish I could get the courage to,” the other confessed. “I’ve been here for hours. The longer I look, the more afraid I am. I am not a boatman, and I have with me only my nephew, who is a young boy, and my wife. If you get through safely, will you run my boat through?”
Kit looked at Shorty, who delayed to answer.
“He’s got his wife with him,” Kit suggested. Nor had he mistaken his man.
“Sure,” Shorty affirmed. “It was just what I was stopping to think about. I knew there was some reason I ought to do it.”
Again they turned to go, but Sprague and Stine made no movement.
“Good luck, Smoke,” Sprague called to him. “I’ll – er – ” He hesitated. “I’ll just stay here and watch you.”
“We need three men in the boat, two at the oars and one at the steering-sweep,” Kit said quietly.
Sprague looked at Stine.
“I’m damned if I do,” said that gentleman. “If you’re not afraid to stand here and look on, I’m not.”
“Who’s afraid?” Sprague demanded hotly.
Stine retorted in kind, and their two men left them in the thick of a squabble.
