Down the Columbia Part 13

Where Ike displayed the concentration of a true artist was in the skiff-lifting shot. Just as the green bow of _Imshallah_ came over the side, a boy who had been stacking cordwood, in rus.h.i.+ng forward to clear the fouled painter, stepped on an unsecured log and went through into the river. By this time, of course, I knew better than to spoil a shot by suspending or changing action in the middle of it, but that Ike should be thus esoterically sapient was rather too much to expect. Yet the sequel proved how much more consummate an artist of the two of us that untutored (even by Roos) old river rat was. When we had finished "Yo-heave-ho-ing" as the skiff settled into place, I (dropping my histrionics like a wet bathing suit) shouted to Ike to come and help me fish that kid out. "What kid?" he drawled in a sort of languid surprise.

Then, after a kind of dazed once-over of the raft, fore-and-aft: "By cripes, the kid _is_ gone!" Now has that ever been beaten for artistic concentration?

The lad, after b.u.mping down along the bottom to the lower end of the raft, had come to the surface no whit the worse for his ducking. He was clambering up over the logs like a wet cat before either Ike or I, teetering across the crooked, wobbly cordwood, had stumbled half the distance to the "stern." "It must be a right sma't betta goin' daun unda than up heah," was Ike's only comment.

The motor-boat which Ike had engaged to tow the raft was already on hand. It had been built by a Spokane mining magnate for use at his summer home on Lake Coeur d'Alene, and was one of the prettiest little craft of the kind I ever saw. With its lines streaming gracefully back from its sharp, beautifully-flared bow, it showed speed from every angle. Hardwood and bra.s.s were in bad shape, but the engines were resplendent; and the engines were the finest thing about it. They had been built to drive it twenty-five miles an hour when she was new, the chap running it said, and were probably good for all of twenty-two yet when he opened up. Except that its hull wasn't rugged enough to stand the banging, it was an ideal river boat, though not necessarily for towing rafts. However, it was mighty handy even at that ignominious work.

I couldn't quite make up my mind about the engineer of the motor boat--not until he settled down to work, that is. His eye was quite satisfactory, but his habit of hesitating before answering a question, and then usually saying "I dunno," conveyed rather the impression of torpid mentality if not actual dulness. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as I realized instantly the moment he started swinging the raft into the current. He merely said "I dunno" because he really didn't know, where an ordinary man would have felt impelled to make half an answer, or at least to say something about the weather or the stage of the river. Earl (I never learned his last name) was sparing with his tongue because he was unsparing with his brain. His mind was always ready to act--and to react. There were to arise several situations well calculated to test the mettle of him, and he was always "there." I have never known so thoroughly useful and dependable a man for working a launch in swift water.

While Ike was completing his final "snugging down" operations, I chanced to observe a long steel-blue and slightly reddish-tinged body working up the bottom toward the stern of the raft. It looked like a salmon, except that it was larger than any member of that family I had ever seen. A blunt-pointed pike-pole is about the last thing one would use for a fish-spear, but, with nothing better ready to hand, I tried it. My first thrust was a bad miss, but, rather strangely, I thought--failed to deflect the loggily nosing monster more than a foot or two from his course. The next thrust went home, but where I was half expecting to have the pole torn from my hands by a wild rush, there was only a sluggish, unresentful sort of a wriggle. As there was no hook or barb to the pike, the best I could do was to worry my prize along the bottom to the bank, where a couple of Indians lifted it out for me. It was a salmon after all--a vicious looking "dog," with a wicked mouthful of curving teeth--but of extraordinary size. It must have weighed between fifty and sixty pounds, for the pike-pole all but snapped when I tried to lift the monster with it. Indeed, its great bulk was undoubtedly responsible for the fact that it was already half-dead from battering on the rocks before I speared it. As the flesh was too soft even for the Indians, I gave it to a German farmer from a nearby clearing to feed to his hogs. Or rather, I traded it. The German had a dog which, for the sake of "human interest," Roos very much wanted to borrow. (Why, seeing it was a dog, he should not have called it "canine interest," I never quite understood; but it was the "heart touch" he wanted, at any rate).

So Ike proposed to the "Dutchman" that we give him fifty pounds of dead "dog" for half that weight of live dog, the latter to be returned when we were through with him. That was Ike's _proposition_. As soon as we were under way, however, he confided to me that he never was going to give that good collie back to a Dutchman. A people that had done what the "Dutchmen" did to Belgium had no right to have a collie anyhow. If they must have dogs, let them keep dachshunds--or pigs. And he forthwith began to alienate that particular collie's affection by feeding him milk chocolate. Poor old Ike! Being only a fresh-water sailor, I fear he did not have a wife in every port, so that there was an empty place in his heart that craved affection.

We cast off at ten o'clock, Earl swung the raft's head out by a steady pull with the launch, and the current completed the operation of turning. Once in mid-stream she made good time, the motor-boat maintaining just enough of a tug to keep the towing-line taut and give her a mile an hour or so of way over the current. That gave Earl a margin to work with, and, pulling sharply now to one side, now to the other, he kept the great pile of logs headed where the current was swiftest and the channel clearest. It was all in using his power at the right time and in the right way. A hundred-ton tugboat would have been helpless in stopping the raft once it started to go in the wrong direction. The trick was to start it right and not let it go wrong, Ike explained--just like raising pups or kids. It was certainly no job for a novice, and I found constant rea.s.surance in the consummate "raftsmans.h.i.+p" our taciturn engineer was displaying.

The hills on both sides of the river grew loftier and more rugged as we ran to the south, and the trees became patchier and scrubbier. The bunch gra.s.s on the diminis.h.i.+ng benches at the bends was withered and brown. It was evident from every sign that we were nearing the arid belt of eastern Was.h.i.+ngton, the great semi-desert plateau that is looped in the bend of the Columbia between the mouth of the Spokane and the mouth of the Snake. The towering split crest of Mitre Rock marked the approach to the slack stretch of water backed up by the boulder barrage over which tumbles Spokane Rapids. The run through the latter was to be our real baptism; a short rapid pa.s.sed a few miles above proving only rough enough to set the raft rolling in fluent undulations and throw a few light gobs of spray over her "bows." We were now going up against something pretty closely approximating the real thing. It wasn't h.e.l.l Gate or Box Canyon by a long way, Ike said, but at the same time it wasn't any place to risk any slip-up.

Save for two or three of the major riffles on the Big Bend of Canada, Spokane Rapids has a stretch of water that must go down hill just about as fast as any on all the Columbia. The channel--although running between boulders--was narrow in the first place, and the deepest part of it was still further restricted by an attempt to clear a way through for steamer navigation in the years when a through service up and down the Columbia was still dreamed of. The channel was deepened considerably, but the effect of this was to divert a still greater flow into it and form a sort of a chute down which the water rushed as through a flume.

Being straight, this channel is not very risky to run, even with a small boat--provided one keeps to it. A wild tumble of rollers just to the left of the head must be avoided, however, even by a raft. That was why we had the motor-boat--to be sure of "hitting the intake right," as Ike put it. And the motor-boat ought to be able to handle the job without help. He had been working hard ever since we started on a gigantic stern-sweep, but that was for h.e.l.l Gate and Box Canyon. Here, with her nose once in right, she should do it on her own.

Mooring the raft against the right bank in the quiet water a couple of hundred yards above the "intake," Earl ran us down to the mouth of the Spokane River in the launch. We were purchasing gasoline and provisions in the little village of Lincoln, just below the Spokane, and Ike thought that the lower end of the rapid would be the best place for Roos to set up to command the raft coming through. It was indeed terrifically fast water, but--because the launch had the power to pick the very best of the channel--the run down just missed the thrill that would have accompanied it had it been up to one's oars to keep his boat out of trouble. Earl shut off almost completely as he slipped into the "V,"

keeping a bare steerage-way over the current. Twenty miles an hour was quite fast enough to be going in the event she _did_ swerve from the channel and hit a rock; there was no point in adding to the potential force of the impact with the engine. As there was a heavy wash from the rapids in even the quietest eddy he could find opposite the town, Earl stayed with the launch, keeping her off the rocks with a pole while Ike, Roos and myself went foraging. Ike spilled gasoline over his back in packing a leaking can down over the boulders, causing burns from which he suffered considerable pain and annoyance when he came to man the sweep the following day.

After dropping Roos on the right bank to set up for the picture, Earl drove the launch back up the rapid to the raft. I hardly know which was the more impressive, the power of the wildly racing rapid or the power of the engine of the launch. It was a ding-dong fight all the way.

Although he nosed at times to within a few inches of the overhanging rocks of the bank in seeking the quietest water, the launch was brought repeatedly to a standstill. There she would hang quivering, until the accelerating engine would impart just the few added revolutions to the propellers that would give her the upper hand again. The final struggle at the "intake" was the bitterest of all, and Earl only won out there by sheering to the right across the "V"--at imminent risk of being swung round, it seemed to me--and reaching less impetuous water.

Throwing off her mooring lines, Earl towed the raft out into the sluggish current. There was plenty of time and plenty of room to manoeuvre her into the proper position. All he had to do was to bring her into the "intake" well clear of the rocks and rollers to the left, and then keep towing hard enough to hold her head down-stream. It was a simple operation--compared, for instance, with what he would have on the morrow at h.e.l.l Gate--but still one that had to be carried out just so if an awful mess-up was to be avoided. Novice as I was with that sort of a raft, I could readily see what would happen if she once got to swinging and turned broadside to the rapid.

That was about the first major rapid I ever recall running when I didn't have something to do, and it was rather a relief to be able to watch the wheels go round and feel that there was nothing to stand-by for. Even Ike, with no sweep to swing, was foot-loose, or rather hand-free.

Knowing Earl's complete capability, he prepared to cast aside navigational worries for the nonce. He had picked up his axe and was about to turn to hewing at the blade of his big steering-oar, when I reminded him that he was still an actor and that he had been ordered to run up and down the raft and register "great anxiety" while within range of the camera.

Perhaps the outstanding sensation of that wild run was the feeling of surprise that swept over me at the almost uncanny speed with which that huge unwieldy ma.s.s of half submerged wood gathered way. In still water it would have taken a powerful tug many minutes to start it moving; here it picked up and leapt ahead like a motor-boat. One moment it was drifting along at three miles an hour; five seconds later, having slid over the "intake," it was doing more than twenty. The actual slope of that first short pitch must have been all of one-in-ten, so that I found myself bracing against the incline of the raft, as when standing in a wagon that starts over the brow of a hill. Then the pitch eased and she hit the rollers, grinding right through them like a floating Juggernaut.

The very worst of them--haughty-headed combers that would have sent the skiff sky-rocketing--simply dissolved against the logs and died in hissing anguish in the tangle of cordwood. The motion had nothing of the jerkiness of even so large a craft as the launch, and one noticed it less under his feet than when he looked back and saw the wallowing undulations of the "deck."

But best of all was the contemptuous might with which the raft stamped out, obliterated, abolished the accursed whirlpools. Spokane was not deep and steep-sided enough to be a dangerous whirlpool rapid, like the Dalles or h.e.l.l Gate, but there were still a lot of mighty mean-mouthed "suckers" lying in ambush where the rollers began to flatten. There was no question of their arrogance and courage. The raft might have been the dainty _Imshallah_, with her annoying feminine weakness for clinging embraces, for all the hesitancy they displayed in attacking it. But, oh, what a difference! Where the susceptible _Imshallah_ had edged off in coy dalliance and ended by all but surrendering, the raft simply thundered ahead. The siren "whouf!" of the lurking brigand was forced back down its black throat as it was literally effaced, smeared from the face of the water. Gad, how I loved to see them die, after all _Imshallah_ and I had had to endure at their foul hands! _Imshallah_, perched safely aloft on a stack of cordwood, took it all with the rather languid interest one would expect from a lady of her quality; but I--well, I fear very much that I was leaning out over the "bows," at an angle not wholly safe under the circ.u.mstances, and registering "ghoulish glee" at the exact point where Roos had told me three times that I must be running up and down in the wake of Ike and registering "great anxiety."

As there was no stopping the raft within a mile or two of the foot of the rapid, it had been arranged that we should launch the skiff as soon as we were through the worst water, and pull in to the first favourable eddy to await Roos and his camera. It was Ike bellowing to me to come and lend him a hand with the skiff that compelled me to relinquish my position at the "bow," where, "thumbs down" at every clash, I had been egging on the raft to slaughter whirlpools. The current was still very swift, so that Ike was carried down a considerable distance before making a landing. As it was slow going for Roos, laden with camera and tripod, over the boulders, ten or fifteen minutes elapsed before they pushed off in pursuit of the raft. The latter, in the meantime, had run a couple of miles farther down river before Earl found a stretch sufficiently quiet to swing her round and check her way by towing up against the current.

In running down to this point the raft had splashed through a slas.h.i.+ng bit of riffle, which I afterwards learned was called Middle Rapid locally. There was a short stretch of good rough white water. Offhand, it looked to me rather sloppier than anything we had put the skiff into so far; but, as it appeared there would be no difficulty in steering a course in fairly smooth water to the left of the rollers, I was not greatly concerned over it. Presently Ike came pulling round the bend at a great rate, and the next thing I knew _Imshallah_ was floundering right down the middle of the frosty-headed combers. Twice or thrice I saw the "V" of her bow shoot skyward, silhouetting like a black wedge against a fan of sun-shot spray. Then she began riding more evenly, and shortly was in smoother water. It was distinctly the kind of thing she did best, and she had come through with flying colours. Roos was grinning when he climbed aboard, but still showed a tinge of green about the gills. "Why didn't you head her into that smooth stretch on the left?" I asked. "_You_ had the steering paddle." "I tried to hard enough," he replied, still grinning, "but Ike wouldn't have it. Said he kinda suspected she'd go through that white stuff all right, and wanted to see if his suspicions were correct." And that was old Ike Emerson to a "T."

We wallowed on through French Rapids and Hawk Creek Rapids in the next hour, and past the little village of Peach, nestling on a broad bench in the autumnal red and gold of its cl.u.s.tering orchards. Ike, pacing the "bridge" with me, said that they used to make prime peach brandy at Peach, and reckoned that p'raps.... "No," I cut in decisively; "_I_ have no desire to return to Kettle Falls." I had jumped at the chance to draw Ike on that remarkable up-river journey of his after the disaster in h.e.l.l Gate, but he sheered off at once. I have grave doubts as to whether that strange phenomenon ever will be explained.

We were now threading a great canyon, the rocky walls of which reared higher and higher in fantastic pinnacles, spires and weird castellations the deeper we penetrated its glooming depths. There had been painters at work, too, and with colourings brighter and more varied than any I had believed to exist outside of the canyons of the Colorado and the Yellowstone. Saffron melting to fawn and dun was there, and vivid streaks that were almost scarlet where fractures were fresh, but had changed to maroon and terra cotta under the action of the weather. A fluted cliff-face, touched by the air-brush of the declining sun, flushed a pink so delicate that one seemed to be looking at it through a rosy mist. There were intenser blocks and ma.s.ses of colours showing in vivid lumps on a b.u.t.tressed cliff ahead, but they were quenched before we reached them in a flood of indigo and mauve shadows that drenched the chasm as the sun dropped out of sight. From the heights it must have been a brilliant sunset, flaming with intense reds and yellows as desert sunsets always are; but looking out through the purple mists of the great gorge there was only a flutter of bright pennons--crimson, gold, polished bronze and dusky olive green--streaming across an ever widening and narrowing notch of jagged rock, black and opaque like splintered ebony. For a quarter of an hour we seemed to be steering for those s.h.i.+mmering pennons as for a harbor beacon; then a sudden up-thrust of black wall cut them off like a sliding door. By the time we were headed west again the dark pall of fallen night had smothered all life out of the flame-drenched sky, leaving it a pure transparent black, p.r.i.c.ked with the twinkle of kindling stars. Only by the absence of stars below could one trace the blank opacity of the blacker black of the towering cliffs.

No one had said anything to me about an all-day-and-all-night schedule for the raft, and, as a matter of fact, running in the night had not entered into the original itinerary at all. The reason we were b.u.mping along in the dark now was that Ike, who had no more idea of time than an Oriental, had pushed off from Gerome an hour late, wasted another unnecessary hour in Lincoln yarning across the sugar barrel at the general store, and, as a consequence, had been overtaken by night ten miles above the point he wanted to make. As there was no fast water intervening, and as Earl had shown no signs of dissent, Ike had simply gone right on ahead regardless. When I asked him if it wasn't a bit risky, he said he thought not very; adding comfortingly that he had floated down on rafts a lot of times before, and hadn't "allus b.u.mped."

If he could see to tighten up stringer pegs, he reckoned Earl ought to be able to see rocks, "'cose rocks was a sight bigger'n pegs."

It was not long after Ike had nullified the effect of his rea.s.suring philosophy by smearing the end of his thumb with a mallet that Earl's night-owl eyes played him false to the extent of overlooking a rock. It may well have been a very small rock, and it was doubtless submerged a foot or more; so there was no use expecting a man to see the ripple above it when there wasn't light enough to indicate the pa.s.sage of his hand before his eyes. It was no fault of Earl's at all, and even the optimistic Ike had claimed no more than that he hadn't "allus b.u.mped."

Nor was it a very serious matter at the worst. The raft merely hesitated a few seconds, swung part way round, slipped free again and, her head brought back at the pull of the launch, resumed her way. The jar of striking was not enough to throw a well-braced man off his feet. (The only reason Roos fell and pulped his ear was because he had failed to set himself at the right angle when the shock came.) The worst thing that happened was the loss of a dozen or so cords of wood which, being unsecurely stacked, toppled over when she struck. Luckily, the boat was parked on the opposite side, as was also Roos. It would have been hard to pick up either before morning, and Roos would hardly have lasted. The wood was a total loss to Ike, of course; but he was less concerned about that than he was over the fact that it reduced her "freeboard" on that quarter by three feet, so that she wouldn't make so much of a "showin'

in the picters." He _did_ raise a howl the next morning, though. That was when he found that his old denim jacket had gone over with the cordwood. It wasn't the "wamus" itself he minded so much, he said, but the fact that in one of that garment's pockets had been stored the milk chocolate which he was using to alienate the affections of the Dutchman's collie. "It's all in gettin' a jump on a pup's feelin's at the fust offsta't," he philosophied bitterly; "an' naow I'll be losin'

mah jump." Rather keen on the psychology of alienation, that observation of old Ike, it struck me.

It was along toward nine o'clock, and shortly after the abrupt walls of the canyon began to fall away somewhat, that a light appeared on the left bank. Making a wide circle just above what had now become a glowing window-square, Earl brought the raft's head up-stream and swung her in against the bank. The place was marked Creston on the maps, but appeared to be spoken of locally as Halberson's Ferry. We spent the night with the hospitable Halbersons, who ran the ferry across to the Colville Reservation side and operated a small sawmill when logs were available.

Earl slept at his ranch, a few miles away on the _mesa_.

The night was intensely cold, and I was not surprised to find icicles over a foot long on the flume behind the house in the morning. The frozen ground returned a metallic clank to the tread of my hob-nailed boots as I stepped outside the door. Then I gave a gasp of amazement, for what did I see but Ike running--with a light, springing step--right along the surface of the river? At my exclamation one of the Halbersons left off toweling and came over to join me. "What's wrong?" he asked, swinging his arms to keep warm. "Wrong!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; "look at that! I know this isn't Galilee; but you don't mean to tell me the Columbia has frozen over during the night!" "Hardly that," was the laughing answer.

"Ike's not running on either the ice or the water; he's just riding a water-soaked log to save walking. It's an old trick of his. Not many can do it like he can." And that was all there was to it. Ike had spotted a drift-log stranded a short distance up-river, and was simply bringing it down the easiest way so as to lash it to the raft and take it to market.

But I should have hated to have seen a thing like that "water-walking"

effect in those long ago days on the Canadian Big Bend, when we used to prime our breakfast coffee with a couple of fingers of "thirty per over-proof."

We cast off at nine-thirty, after Ike had laid in some more "component parts" of his mighty sweep at the little sawmill. Although less deeply encanyoned than through the stretch down which we pa.s.sed the previous night, there were still enormously high cliffs on both sides of the river. Trees and brush were scarcer and scrubbier than above, and the general aspect was becoming more and more like the semi-arid parts of the Colorado Desert. The colouring was somewhat less vivid than the riot in the canyon above, but was almost equally varied. The colour-effect was diversified along this part of the river by the appearance of great patches of rock-growing lichen, shading through half a dozen reds and browns to the most delicate amethyst and sage-green. At places it was impossible to tell from the river where the mineral pigments left off and the vegetable coating began.

The river was broad and widening, with a comparatively slow current and only occasional stretches of white water. I took the occasion to launch the skiff and paddle about for an hour, trying to get some line on the speed at which the raft was towing. In smooth water I found I had the legs of her about three-to-one, and in rapids of about two-to-one. From this I figured that she did not derive more than from a mile and a half to two miles an hour of her speed from the launch. I only raced her through one bit of rapid, and she was such a poor sport about the course that I refused to repeat the stunt. Just as I began to spurt past her down through the jumping white caps she did a sort of a side-slip and crowded me out of the channel and into a rather messy souse-hole. The outraged _Imshallah_ gulped a big mouthful, but floundered through right-side up, as she always seemed able to do in that sort of stuff.

But I pulled into an eddy and let the hulking old wood-pile have the right-of-way, declining Earl's tooted challenge for a brush in the riffle immediately following. A monster that could eat whirlpools alive wasn't anything for a skiff to monkey with the business end of. I boarded her respectfully by the stern and pulled _Imshallah_ up after me.

The great bald dome of White Rock, towering a thousand feet above the left bank of the river, signalled our approach to h.e.l.l Gate. Towing across a broad reach of quiet water, Earl laid the raft against the left bank about half a mile above where a pair of black rock jaws, froth-flecked and savage, seemed closing together in an attempt to bite the river in two. That was as close as it was safe to stop the raft, Earl explained as we made fast the mooring lines, for the current began to accelerate rapidly almost immediately below. There were some shacks and an ancient apple orchard on the bench above, and Ike came over to whisper that they used to make some mighty kicky cider there once upon a time, and perhaps.... I did not need the prompting of Earl's admonitory head-shake. "Get a jump on you with the sweep," I said, "while Earl and I go down and help Roos set up. There'll be time enough to talk about cider below h.e.l.l Gate." I saw a somewhat (to judge from a distance) Bacchantic ciderette picking her way down the bench bank to the raft as the launch sped off down stream, but if Ike realized dividends from the visit there was never anything to indicate it.

Although h.e.l.l Gate is a long ways from being the worst rapid on the Columbia, it comes pretty near to qualifying as the _worst looking_ rapid. A long black reef, jutting out from the left bank, chokes the river into a narrow channel and forces it over against the rocky wall on the right. It shoots between these obstructions with great velocity, only to split itself in two against a big rock island a hundred yards farther down. The more direct channel is to the right, but it is too narrow to be of use. The main river, writhing like a wounded snake after being bounced off the sheer wall of the island, zigzags on through the black basaltic barrier in a course shaped a good deal like an elongated letter "Z." h.e.l.l Gate is very much like either the Great or Little Dalles would be if a jog were put into it by an earthquake--a rapid shaped like a flash of lightning, and with just as much kick in it.

After much climbing and scrambling over rocks, Roos found a place about half way down the left side of the jagged gorge from which he could command the raft rounding the first leg of the "Z" and running part of the second leg. It would have taken a half dozen machines to cover the whole run through, but the place he had chosen was the one which would show the most one camera could be expected to get. It would miss entirely the main thing--the fight to keep the raft from b.u.mping the rock island and splitting in two like the river did. That could not be helped, however. A set up in a place to catch that would have caught very little else, and we desired to show something of the general character of the gorge and rapid. Roos, solacing himself with the remark to the effect that, if the raft _did_ break up, probably the biggest part of the wreck would come down his side, was cutting himself a "sylvan frame" through the branches of a gnarled old screw pine as we left him to go to the launch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IKE RIDING A LOG]

[Ill.u.s.tration: IKE ON THE MOORING LINE OF THE RAFT]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RAFT IN TOW OF LAUNCH NEAR MOUTH OF SAN POIL (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: IKE AT THE SWEEP BELOW h.e.l.l GATE (_below_)]

Ike was sitting on the bank talking with a couple of men from the farm-house when we got back to the raft. He had completed the sweep, he said, but as he had forgotten to provide any "pin" to hang it on he didn't quite know what to do. Perhaps we had better go up to the farm-house and have dinner first, and then maybe he would think of something. The thought of keeping Roos--whom I had seen on the verge of apoplexy over a half minute delay once he was ready for action--standing with crooked elbow at his crank, waiting an hour or more for the raft to shoot round the bend the next second, struck me as so ludicrous that I had to sit down myself to laugh without risk of rolling into the river. When I finally got my breath and sight back, I found Earl's ready mind had hit upon the idea of using the hickory adze-handle as a pivot for the sweep and that he and Ike were already rigging it. Ten minutes later the launch had swung the raft out into the current and we were headed for h.e.l.l Gate.

The sweep, clumsy as it looked, was most ingeniously constructed. Its handle was a four-inch-in-diameter fir trunk, about twenty feet in length. One end of it had been hewn down to give hand-grip on it, and the other split to receive the blade. The latter was a twelve-foot plank, a foot and a half in width and three inches in thickness, roughly rounded and hewn to the shape of the flat of an oar. It was set at a slight upward tilt from the fir-trunk handle. Ike had contrived to centre the weight of the whole sweep so nicely that you could swing it on its adze-handle pivot with one hand. Swing it in the air, I mean; submerged, five or six men would have been none too few to force that colossal blade through the water. Ike admitted that himself, but reckoned that the two of us ought to be 'better'n nothin' 'tall.'

As we swung out into the quickening current, I mentioned to Ike that, as I had never even seen a sweep of that kind in operation, much less worked at it myself, it might now be in order for him to give me some idea of what he hoped to do with it, and how. "Ye're right," he a.s.sented, after ejecting the inevitable squirt of tobacco and parking the residuary quid out of the way of his tongue as a squirrel stows a nut; "ye're right; five minutes fer eloosidashun an' r'h'rsal." As usual, Ike overestimated the time at his disposal; nevertheless, his intensive method of training was so much to the point that I picked up a "right smart bit o' sweep dope" before we began to cram into the crooked craw of h.e.l.l Gate.

This was the biggest raft he had ever tried to take through, Ike explained, but he'd never had so powerful a motor launch; and Earl was the best man in his line on the Columbia. He reckoned that the launch would be able to swing the head of the raft clear of the rock island where the river split "agin" it; but swinging _out_ the head would have the effect of swinging in the stern. We were to man the sweep for the purpose of keeping the raft from striking amids.h.i.+ps. We would only have to stroke one way, but we'd sure have to "jump into it billy h.e.l.l!"

"That being so," I suggested, "perhaps we better try a practice stroke or two to perfect our team-work." That struck Ike as reasonable, and so we went at it, he on the extreme end of the handle, I one "grip" farther along.

Pressing the handle almost to our feet in order to elevate the blade, we dipped the latter with a swinging upward lift and jumped into the stroke. In order to keep the blade well submerged, it was necessary to exert almost as much force upward as forward. The compression on the spine was rather awful--especially as I was two or three inches taller than Ike, and on top of that, had the "inside" berth, where the handle was somewhat nearer the deck. But the blade moved through the water when we both straightened into it; slowly at first, and more rapidly toward the end of the stroke. Then we lifted the blade out of the water, and Ike swung it back through the air alone. I had only to "crab-step" back along the runway--a couple of planks laid over the cordwood--and be ready for the next stroke. Twice we went through that operation, without--so far as I could see--having any effect whatever upon the raft; but that was only because I was expecting "skiff-action" from a hundred tons of logs. We really must have altered the course considerably, for presently a howl came back from Earl to "do it t'other way," as we were throwing her out of the channel. By the time we had "corrected" with a couple of strokes in the opposite direction the launch was dipping over the crest of the "intake." Straightening up but not relinquis.h.i.+ng the handle, Ike said to "let 'er ride fer a minnit,"

but to stand-by ready.

That swift opening run through the outer portal of h.e.l.l Gate offered about the only chance I had for a "look-see." My recollections of the interval that followed at the sweep are a good deal blurred. I noted that the water of the black-walled chasm down which we were racing was swift and deep, but not--right there at least--too rough for the skiff to ride. I noted how the sharp point of the rock island ahead threw off two unequal back-curving waves, as a battles.h.i.+p will do when turning at full speed. I remember thinking that, if I were in the skiff, I would try to avoid the island by sheering over to the right-hand channel. It looked too hard a pull to make the main one to the left; and the latter would have the worst whirlpools, too. I noted how confoundedly in the way of the river that sharp-nosed island was; and not only of the river, but of anything coming down the river. With that up-stabbing point out of the stream, how easy it would be! But since....

"Stan'-by!" came in a growl from Ike. "'Memba naow--'billy h.e.l.l' when I says 'jump!'" By the fact that he spat forth the whole of his freshly-bitten quid I had a feeling that the emergency was considerably beyond the ordinary. My last clear recollection was of Earl's sharply altering his course just before he nosed into the roaring back-curving wave thrown off by the island and beginning to tow to the left with his line at half of a right-angle to the raft. The staccato of his accelerating engine cut like the rattle of a machine-gun through the heavy rumble of the rapid, and I knew that he had thrown it wide open even before the foam-geyser kicked up by the propellers began to tumble over onto the stern of the launch. On a reduced scale, it was the same sort of in-tumbling jet that a destroyer throws up when, at the appearance of an ominous blur in the fog, she goes from quarter-speed-ahead to full-speed-astern. A jet like that means that the spinning screws are meeting almost solid resistance in the water.

Ike's shoulder cut off my view ahead now, and I knew that the bow was swinging out only from the way the stern was swinging in. At his grunted "Now!" we did our curtsey-and-bow to the sweep-handle, just as we had practised it, then dipped the blade and drove it hard to the right.

Four or five times we repeated that stroke, and right smartly, too, it seemed to me. The stern stopped swinging just at the right time, shooting by the foam-whitened fang of the black point by a good ten feet. The back-curving wave crashed down in solid green on the starboard quarter--but harmlessly. There was water enough to have swamped a _batteau_, but against a raft the comber had knocked its head off for nothing.

Under Ike's a.s.surance that the battle would all be over but the shouting in half a minute, I had put about everything I had into those half dozen mighty pushes with the sweep. I started to back off leisurely and resume my survey of the scenery as we cleared the point, but Ike's mumbled "Nother one!" brought me back to the sweep again. Evidently there had been some kind of a slip-up. "Wha' 'smatter?" I gurgled, as we swayed onto the kicking handle, and "Engin's on blink," rumbled the chesty reply. "Gotta keep'er off wi' sweep."

It had been the motor-boat's role, after keeping the head of the raft clear of the point of the island by a strong side pull, to tow out straight ahead again as soon as the menace of collision was past. Earl was trying to do this now (I glimpsed as I crab-stepped back), but with two or three cylinders missing was not able to do much more than straighten out the tow-line. As the raft was already angling to the channel, the fact the current was swifter against the side of the island had the tendency to throw her stern in that direction. It was up to the sweep to keep her from striking, just as it had been at the point. What made it worse now was that the possible points of impact were scattered all the way along for two or three hundred yards, while the launch was giving very little help.