Part 8 (2/2)
After Andy's experience in Surprise Rapids, neither of us was inclined to throw his whole weight into a lift that might leave him overbalanced when the boat was swept out of his reach. And so we pulled and hauled and cursed (I should hate to have to record all we said about the ancestry of the river, the boat, and the two rocks that held the boat), while the tentacles of the cold clutched deeper with every pa.s.sing minute. Roos, sitting on a pine stump and whittling, furnished no help but some slight diversion. When he started singing ”Old Green River”
just after I had slipped and soused my head in the current, I stopped tugging at the boat for long enough to wade out and shy a stone at him.
”Green River”[1] was all right in its place, but its place was swirling against the _inside_ of the ribs, not the _outside_. Roos had the cheek to pick the rock up out of his lap and heave it back at me--but with an aim less certain than my own. A few minutes later he called out to Blackmore to ask if this new rapid had a name, adding that if it had not, he would like to do his employer, Mr. Chester, the honour of naming it after him. Blackmore relaxed his strain on the line for a moment to roar back that no rapid was ever named after a man unless he had been ”drownded” in it. ”We'll name this one after you if you'll do the needful,” he growled as an afterthought, throwing his weight again onto his line. That tickled Andy and me so mightily that we gave a prodigious heave in all recklessness of consequences, and off she came. Gaining the bank with little trouble, we joined Blackmore and helped him haul her up by line into slower water.
[1] For the benefit of those who have forgotten, or may never have known, I will state that ”Green River” was the name of a brand of whisky consumed by ancient Americans with considerable gusto. L. R. F.
”No good lining,” the ”Skipper” announced decidedly, as we sat down to rest for a spell; ”I'm going to drive her straight through.” Chilled, weary and dead-beat generally, I was in a state of mind that would have welcomed jumping into the rapid with a stone tied to my neck rather than go back to the half-submerged wading and lifting. Roos said he hated to risk his camera, and so would try to crawl with it over the cliff and rejoin us below the rapid. Andy said he was quite game to pull his oar for a run if we had to, but that he would first like to try lining down the opposite bank. He thought we could make it _there_, and he had just a bit of a doubt about what might happen in mid-river. That was reasonable enough, and Blackmore readily consented to try the other side.
[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR WETTEST CAMP AT KINBASKET LAKE (_above_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD FERRY TOWER ABOVE CANOE RIVER (_below_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE WE TIED UP AT KINBASKET LAKE (_above_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIDGE WHICH THE COLUMBIA CARRIED A HUNDRED MILES AND PLACED ACROSS ANOTHER STREAM (_center_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: LINING DOWN TO THE HEAD OF DEATH RAPIDS (_below_)]
Almost at once it appeared that we had landed in the same trouble as on the right bank. Directly off the mouth of the stream that came down from the slide the bow of the boat was caught and held between two submerged rocks, defying our every attempt to lift it over. Blackmore was becoming impatient again, and was just ready to give up and run, when Andy, with the aid of a young tree-trunk used as a lever, rolled one of the boulders aside and cleared the way. Five minutes later we had completed lining down and were pus.h.i.+ng off for the final run to the Ferry. No more ”mystery rapids” cropped up to disturb our voyage, and, pulling in deep, swift water, we made the next five miles in twenty-five minutes. A part of the distance was through the rocky-walled Red Canyon, one of the grandest scenic bits of the Bend. At one point Blackmore showed us a sheer-sided rock island, on which he said he had once found the graves of two white men, with an inscription so worn as to be indecipherable. He thought they were probably those of miners lost during the Cariboo gold-field excitement of the middle of the last century, or perhaps even those of Hudson Bay _voyageurs_ of a century or more back. There were many unidentified graves all the way round the Bend, he said.
The river walls fell back a bit on both sides as we neared our destination, and the low-hanging western sun had found a gap in the Selkirks through which it was pouring its level rays to flood with a rich amber light the low wooded benches at the abandoned crossing. The old Ferry-tower reared itself upward like the Statue of Liberty, bathing its head in the golden light of the expiring day. Steering for it as to a beacon, Blackmore beached the boat on a gravel bar flanking an eddy almost directly under the rusting cable. We would cross later to spend the night in a trapper's cabin on the opposite bank, he said; as there was sure to be a shovel or two in the old ferry shacks, he had come there at once so as to get down to business without delay.
Right then and there, before we left the boat, I did a thing which I have been greatly gratified that I did do--right then and there. I drew my companions close to me and a.s.sured them that I had made up my mind to divide the spoils with them. Blackmore and Andy should have a gallon apiece, and Roos a quart. (I scaled down the latter's share sharply, partly because he had thrown that stone back at me, and the nerve of it rankled, and partly--I must confess--out of ”professional jealousy.”
”Stars” and ”Directors” never do hit off.) The rest I would retain and divide with Captain Armstrong as agreed. I did not tell them that I had high hopes that Armstrong would soften in the end and let me keep it all to take home. After all of them (including Roos) had wrung my hand with grat.i.tude, we set to work, each in his own way.
The spot was readily located the moment we took the compa.s.s bearing.
Pacing off was quite unnecessary. It was in the angle of a V-shaped outcrop of bedrock, where a man who knew about what was there could feel his way and claw up the treasure in the dark. It was an ”inevitable”
hiding place, just as Gibraltar is an inevitable fortress and Manhattan an inevitable metropolis. Yes, we each went to work in our own way.
Blackmore and Andy found a couple of rusty shovels and went to digging; Roos climbed up into the old ferry basket to take a picture of them digging; I climbed up on the old shack to take a picture of Roos taking a picture of them digging. Nothing was omitted calculated to preserve historical accuracy. I had been in Baalbek just before the war when a German archaeological mission had inaugurated excavation for Phoenician antiquities, and so was sapient in all that an occasion of the kind required.
The picture cycle complete, I strolled over to where Andy and Blackmore were making the dirt fly like a pair of Airedales digging out a badger.
The ground was soft, they said, leaning on their shovels; it ought to be only the matter of minutes now. The ”showings” were good. They had already unearthed a glove, a tin cup and a fragment of barrel iron.
”Gorgeous stroke of luck for us that chap, K----, hit the stuff so hard up at Kinbasket,” I murmured ecstatically. Blackmore started and straightened up like a man hit with a steel bullet. ”What was that name again?” he gasped. ”K----,” I replied wonderingly; ”some kind of a Swede, I believe Armstrong said. But what difference does his name make as long as....”
Blackmore tossed his shovel out of the hole and climbed stiffly up after it before he replied. When he spoke it was in a voice thin and trailing, as though draggled by the Weariness of the Ages. ”Difference, boy! All the difference between h.e.l.l and happiness. About two years ago K---- dropped out of sight from Revelstoke, and it was only known he had gone somewhere on the Bend. A week after he returned he died in the hospital of the 'D. T's.'”
Roos (perhaps because he had the least to lose by the disaster) was the only one who had the strength to speak. It seemed that he had studied Latin in the high school. ”_Sic transit gloria spiritum frumenti_,” was what he said. Never in all the voyage did he speak so much to the point.
Blackmore frowned at him gloomily as the mystic words were solemnly p.r.o.nounced. ”Young feller,” he growled, ”I don't savvy what the last part of that drug-store lingo you're spitting means; but you're dead right about the first part. _Sick_ is sure the word.”
We spent the night in an empty trapper's cabin across the river. Charity forbids that I lift the curtain of the house of mourning.
CHAPTER VIII
III. RUNNING THE BEND
_Boat Encampment to Revelstoke_
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