Down the Columbia Part 18

With two or three more "Aphrodites" beginning to bubble up through the steam, it is just possible that some such an ocular barrage actually was in process of formation; but I think not. My hard-plied oars had hardly lengthened my interval to much over fifty yards, when the whole lot of them trooped down to the river--steaming amazingly they were at the touch of the sharp early winter air--and plunged into the icy water. I learned later that this "sweat-bath" treatment is the favourite cure-all with the Indians of that part of the Columbia Basin.

Where the left-hand channel returned to the main Columbia a mile or more below the mouth of the River Des Chutes I encountered an extensive series of rock-reefs which, until I drew near them, seemed to block the way completely. It was a sinuous course I wound in threading my way through the ugly basaltic outcroppings, but the comparatively slow water robbed it of any menace. Once clear of the rocks, I found myself at the head of the long, lake-like stretch of water backed up above Celilo Falls. The low rumble of the greatest cataract of the lower Columbia was already pulsing in the air, while a floating cloud of "water-smoke," white against the encroaching cliffs, marked its approximate location. I was at last approaching the famous "long portage" of the old _voyageurs_, a place noted (in those days) for the worst water and the most treacherous Indians on the river. Now, however, the Indians no longer blocked the way and exacted toll, while the portage had been bridged by a Government ca.n.a.l. I caught the loom of the head-gate of the latter about the same time that the bridge of the "North-Bank" branch line, which spans the gorge below the falls, began rearing its blurred fret-work above the mists. Then, once again, Romance. "Ladies' Day" was not yet over. As I pulled in toward the entrance to the ca.n.a.l, at the left of the head of the falls, I observed a very gaily-blanketed dame dancing up and down on the bank and gesticulating toward the opposite side of the river. As I landed and started to pull the skiff up on the gravelly beach, she came trotting down to entreat, in her best "Anglo-Chinook," that I ferry her to the opposite bank, where her home was, and, where, apparently, she was long overdue. She wasn't a beggar, she a.s.sured me, but--jingling her beaded bag under my nose--was quite willing to pay me "_hiyu chickamon_" for my services. Nor was she unduly persistent. No sooner had I told her that I was in a "_hiyu rush_" and hadn't the time just then to be a squire of dames, than she bowed her head in stoical acquiescence and went back to her waving and croaking. It was that futile old croak (with not enough power behind it to send it a hundred yards across a mile-wide river) that caved my resolution. Shoving _Imshallah_ back into the water, I told her to pile in.

And so Romance drew near to me again, this time perched up in the long-empty stern-sheets of my boat. This one was neither an infant nor a centurienne, but rather a fair compromise between the two. Nor was she especially fair nor especially compromising (one couldn't expect that of a sixty-year-old squaw); but she was the most trusting soul I ever met, and that's something. The falls were thundering not fifty yards below--near enough to wet us with their up-blown spray,--and yet not one word of warning did she utter about giving the brink a wide birth in pulling across. Not that I needed such a warning, for the first thing I did was to start pulling up-stream in the slack water; but, all the same, it was a distinct compliment to have it omitted. As it turned out, there was nothing to bother about, for the current was scarcely swifter in mid-stream than along the banks. It was an easy pull. Romance beamed on me all the way, and once, when one of her stubby old toes came afoul of my hob-nailed boot, she bent over and gave a few propitiary rubs to--the boot ... as if _that_ had lost any cuticle. And at parting, when I waved her money-bag aside and told her to keep her _chickamon_ to spend on the movies, she came and patted me affectionately on the shoulder, repeating over and over "_Close tum-tum mika!_" And that, in Chinook, means: "You're very much all right!" As far as I can remember, that is the only unqualified praise I ever had from a lady--one of that age, I mean. Squiring squaws--especially dear old souls like that one--is a lot better fun than a man would think.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LIFTED DRAWBRIDGE ON CELILO Ca.n.a.l (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TUMWATER GORGE OF THE GRAND DALLES (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IMSHALLAH" IN THE LOCK AT FIVE-MILE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IMSHALLAH" HALF WAY THROUGH THE CELILO Ca.n.a.l]

It was four o'clock when I turned up at the lock-master's house at Celilo, and then to find that that worthy had just taken his gun and gone off up on the cliffs to try and bag a goose. As it would probably be dark before he returned, his wife reckoned I had better put up with them for the night and make an early start through the Ca.n.a.l the following morning. The lock-master, a genial Texan, came down with his goose too late it get it ready for supper, but not to get it picked that night. Indeed, we made rather a gala occasion of it. "Mistah" Sides got out his fiddle and played "The Arkansaw Traveller" and "Turkey in the Straw," the while his very comely young wife accompanied on the piano and their two children, the village school-marm and myself collaborated on the goose. It was a large bird, but many hands make light work; that is, as far as getting the feathers off the goose was concerned. Cleaning up the kitchen was another matter. As it was the giddy young school-teacher who _started_ the trouble by putting feathers down my neck, I hope "Missus" Sides made that demure-eyed minx swab down decks in the morning before she went to teach the young idea how to shoot.

There is no lock at the head of the Celilo Ca.n.a.l, but a gate is maintained for the purpose of regulating flow and keeping out drift.

Sides, silhouetted against the early morning clouds, worked the gates and let me through into the narrow, concrete-walled ca.n.a.l, down which I pulled with the thunder of the falls on one side and on the other the roar of a pa.s.sing freight. The earth-shaking rumbles died down presently, and beyond the bend below the railway bridge I found myself rowing quietly through the shadow of the great wall of red-black cliffs that dominate the Dalles from the south.

Celilo Falls is a replica on a reduced scale of the Horse-shoe cataract at Niagara. At middle and low-water there is a drop of twenty feet here, but at the flood-stage of early summer the fall is almost wiped out in the lake backed up from the head of the Tumwater gorge of the Dalles.

The Dalles then form one practically continuous rapid, eight or nine miles in length, with many terrific swirls and whirlpools, but with all rocks so deeply submerged that it is _possible_ for a well-handled steamer to run through in safety--provided she is lucky. With the completion of the Ca.n.a.l this wildest of all steamer runs was no longer necessary, but in the old days it was attempted a number of times when it was desired to take some craft that had been constructed on the upper river down to Portland. The first steamer was run through successfully in May, 1866, by Captain T. J. Stump, but the man who became famous for his success in getting away with this dare-devil stunt was Captain James Troup, perhaps the greatest of all Columbia skippers. Professor W.

D. Lyman gives the following graphic account of a run through the Dalles with Captain Troup, on the _D. S. Baker_, in 1888.

"At that strange point in the river, the whole vast volume is compressed into a channel but one hundred and sixty feet wide at low water and much deeper than wide. Like a huge mill-race the current continues nearly straight for two miles, when it is hurled with frightful force against a ma.s.sive bluff. Deflected from the bluff, it turns at a sharp angle to be split asunder by a low reef of rock. When the _Baker_ was drawn into the suck of the current at the head of the 'chute' she swept down the channel, which was almost black, with streaks of foam, to the bluff, two miles in four minutes. There feeling the tremendous refluent wave, she went careening over toward the sunken reef.

The skilled captain had her perfectly in hand, and precisely at the right moment rang the signal bell, 'Ahead, full speed,' and ahead she went, just barely scratching her side on the rock. Thus close was it necessary to calculate distance. If the steamer had struck the tooth-like point of the reef broadside on, she would have been broken in two and carried in fragments on either side.

Having pa.s.sed this danger point, she glided into the beautiful calm bay below and the feat was accomplished."

There is a fall of eighty-one feet in the twelve miles from the head of Celilo Falls to the foot of the Dalles. This is the most considerable rate of descent in the whole course of the Columbia in the United States, though hardly more than a third of that over stretches of the Big Bend in Canada. It appeared to be customary for the old _voyageurs_ to make an eight or ten miles portage here, whether going up or down stream, though there were doubtless times when their big _batteaux_ were equal to running the Dalles below Celilo. I climbed out and took hurried surveys of both Tumwater and Five-Mile (sometimes called "The Big Chute") in pa.s.sing, and while they appeared to be such that I would never have considered taking a chance with a skiff in either of them, it did look as though a big double-ender, with an experienced crew of oarsmen and paddlers, would have been able to make the run. That was a snap judgment, formed after the briefest kind of a "look-see," and it may well be that I was over optimistic.

The Celilo Ca.n.a.l, which was completed by the Government about five years ago, is eight and a half miles long, has a bottom width of sixty-five feet, and a depth of eight feet. It has a total lift of eighty feet, of which seventy are taken by two locks in flight at the lower end. That this ca.n.a.l has failed of its object--that of opening up through navigation between tide-water and the upper Columbia--is due to no defect of its own from an engineering standpoint, but rather to the fact that, first the railway, and now the truck, have made it impossible for river steamers to pay adequate returns in the face of costly operation and the almost prohibitive risks of running day after day through rock-beset rapids. There is not a steamer running regularly on the Columbia above the Dalles to-day. The best service, perhaps, which the Celilo Ca.n.a.l rendered was the indirect one of forcing a very considerable reduction of railway freight rates. That alone is said to have saved the s.h.i.+ppers of eastern Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton many times the cost of this highly expensive undertaking.

I pulled at a leisurely gait down the Ca.n.a.l, stopping, as I have said, at Tumwater and Five-Mile, and at the latter giving the lock-master a hand in dropping _Imshallah_ down a step to the next level. Rowing past a weird "fleet" of laid-up salmon-wheels in the Big Eddy Basin, I sheered over to the left bank in response to a jovial hail, and found myself shaking hands with Captain Stewart Winslow, in command of the Government dredge, _Umatilla_, and one of the most experienced skippers on the upper river. He said that he had been following the progress of my voyage by the papers with a good deal of interest, and had been on the lookout to hold me over for a yarn. As I was anxious to make the Dalles that night, so as to get away for an early start on the following morning, he readily agreed to join me for the run and dinner at the hotel.

While Captain Winslow was making a hurried s.h.i.+ft of togs for the river, I had a brief but highly interesting visit with Captain and Mrs.

Saunders. Captain Saunders, who is of the engineering branch of the army, has been in charge of the Celilo Ca.n.a.l for a number of years. Mrs.

Saunders has a very large and valuable collection of Indian relics and curios, and at the moment of my arrival was following with great interest the progress of a State Highway cut immediately in front of her door, which was uncovering, evidently in an old graveyard, some stone mortars of unusual size and considerable antiquity. When Captain Winslow was ready, we went down to the skiff, and pulled along to the first lock. With Captain Saunders and a single helper working the machinery, pa.s.sing us down to the second lock and on out into the river was but the matter of a few minutes.

Big Eddy must be rather a fearsome hole at high water, but below middle stage there is not enough power behind its slow-heaving swirls to make them troublesome. It was a great relief to have a competent river-man at the paddle again, and my rather over-craned neck was not the least beneficiary by the change. The narrows at Two-Mile were interesting rather for what they might be than what they were. Beyond a lively snaking about in the conflicting currents, it was an easy pa.s.sage through to the smooth water of the broadening river below. One or two late salmon-wheels plashed eerily in the twilight as we ran past the black cliffs, but fis.h.i.+ng for the season was practically over weeks before. We landed just above the steamer dock well before dark, beached the skiff, stowed my outfit in the warehouse, and reached the hotel in time to avoid an early evening shower. Captain Winslow had to dine early in order to catch his train back to Big Eddy, but we had a mighty good yarn withal.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HOME STRETCH

The Dalles was the largest town I touched on the Columbia, and one of the most attractive. Long one of the largest wool-s.h.i.+pping centres of the United States, it has recently attained to considerable importance as a fruit market. It will not, however, enter into anything approaching the full enjoyment of its birthright until the incalculably enormous power possibilities of Celilo Falls and the Dalles have been developed.

So far, as at every other point along the Columbia with the exception of a small plant at Priest Rapids, nothing has been done along this line.

When it is, The Dalles will be in the way of becoming one of the most important industrial centres of the West.

In the days of the _voyageurs_ The Dalles was notorious for the unspeakably treacherous Indians who congregated there to intimidate and plunder all who pa.s.sed that unavoidable portage. They were lying, thieving scoundrels for the most part, easily intimidated by a show of force and far less p.r.o.ne to stage a real fight than their more warlike brethren who disputed the pa.s.sage at the Cascades. That this "plunderbund" tradition is one which the present-day Dalles is making a great point of living down, I had conclusive evidence of through an incident that arose in connection with my hotel bill. I had found my room extremely comfortable and well appointed, so that the bill presented for it at my departure, far from striking me as unduly high, seemed extremely reasonable. I think I may even have said something to that effect; yet, two days later in Portland, I received a letter containing an express order for one dollar, and a note saying that this was the amount of an unintentional over-charge for my room. That was characteristic of the treatment I received from first to last in connection with my small financial transactions along the way. I never dreamed that there were still so many people in the world above profiteering at the expense of the pa.s.sing tourist until I made my Columbia voyage.

I had intended, by making an early start from The Dalles, to endeavour to cover the forty odd miles to the head of the Cascades before dark of the same day. Two things conspired to defeat this ambitious plan: first, some unexpected mail which had to be answered, and, second, my equally unexpected booking of a pa.s.senger--a way pa.s.senger who had to be landed well short of the Cascades. Just as I was cleaning up the last of my letters, the hotel clerk introduced me to the "Society Editor" of The Dalles _Chronicle_, who wanted an interview. I told her that I was already two hours behind schedule, but that if she cared to ride the running road with me for a while, she could have the interview, with lunch thrown in, on the river. She accepted with alacrity, but begged for half an hour to clean up her desk at the _Chronicle_ office and change to out-door togs. Well within that limit, she was back again at the hotel, flushed, pant-ing and pant-ed, and announced that she was ready. Picking up a few odds and ends of food at the nearest grocery, we went down to the dock, where I launched and loaded up _Imshallah_ in time to push off at ten o'clock. I had, of course, given up all idea of making the Cascades that day, and reckoned that Hood River, about twenty-five miles, would be a comfortable and convenient halting place for the night. And so it would have been....

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALISADE ROCK, LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MULTNOMAH FALLS COLUMBIA RIVER HIGHWAY, NEAR PORTLAND]

I don't remember whether or not we ever got very far with the "interview," but I do recall that Miss S---- talked very interestingly of Johan Bojer and his work, and that she was in the midst of a keenly a.n.a.lytical review of "The Great Hunger" when a sudden darkening of what up to then had been only a slightly overcast sky reminded me that I had been extremely remiss in the matter of keeping an eye on the weather.

Indeed, up to that moment the menace of storms on the river had been of such small moment as compared to that of rapids that I had come to rate it as no more than negligible. Now, however, heading into the heart of the Cascades, I was approaching a series of gorges long notorious among river _voyageurs_ as a veritable "wind factory"--a "storm-breeder" of the worst description. After all that I had read of the way in which the early pioneers had been held up for weeks by head winds between the Dalles and the Cascades, there was no excuse for my failure to keep a weather eye lifting at so treacherous a point. The only _alibi_ I can think of is Adam's: "The woman did it." Nor is there any ungallantry in that plea. Quite the contrary, in fact; for I am quite ready to confess that I should probably fail to watch the clouds again under similar circ.u.mstances.

There were a few stray mavericks of suns.h.i.+ne shafts trying to struggle down to the inky pit of the river as I turned to give the weather a once-over, but they were quenched by the sinister cloud-pall even as I looked. The whole gorge of the river-riven Cascades was heaped full of wallowing nimbus which, driven by a fierce wind, was rolling up over the water like an advancing smoke-barrage. The forefront of the wind was marked by a wild welter of foam-white water, while a half mile behind a streaming curtain of gray-black indicated the position of the advancing wall of the rain. It would have been a vile-looking squall even in the open sea; here the sinister threat of it was considerably accentuated by the towering cliffs and the imminent outcrops of black rock studding the surface of the river. I had no serious doubt that _Imshallah_, after all the experience she had had in rough water, would find any great difficulty in riding out the blow where she was, but since it hardly seemed hospitable to subject my lady guest to any more of a wetting than could be avoided, I turned and headed for the lee sh.o.r.e. Miss S---- was only about half m.u.f.fled in the rubber saddle _poncho_ and the light "shed" tent I tossed to her before resuming my oars when the wall of the wind--hard and solid as the side of a flying barn--struck us full on the starboard beam. It was rather careless of me, not heading up to meet that squall before it struck; but the fact was that I simply couldn't take seriously anything that it seemed possible _could_ happen on such a deep, quiet stretch of river. The consequence of taking that buffet on the beam was quite a merry bit of a mix-up. The shower-bath of blown spray and the dipping under of the lee rail were rather the least of my troubles. What did have me guessing for a minute, though, was the result of the fact that that confounded fifty-miles-an-hour zephyr got under the corners of the tent and, billowing it monstrously, carried about half of it overboard; also a somewhat lesser amount of Miss S----, who was just wrapping herself in it. I had to drop my oars to effect adequate salvage operations, and so leave the skiff with her port gunwale pretty nearly hove under. As soon as I got around to swing her head up into the teeth of the wind things eased off a bit.

The river was about a mile wide at this point--ten miles below The Dalles and about opposite the station of Rowena--and, save for occasional outcroppings of black bedrock, fairly deep. The north sh.o.r.e was rocky all the way along, but that to the south (which was also the more protected on account of a jutting point ahead) was a broad sandy beach. That beach seemed to offer a comparatively good landing, and, as it extended up-stream for half a mile, it appeared that I ought to have no great difficulty in fetching it. The first intimation I had that this might not be as easy as I had reckoned came when, in spite of the fact that I was pulling down-stream in a three or four-mile current, the wind backed the skiff up-stream past a long rock island at a rate of five or six miles an hour. That was one of the queerest sensations I experienced on the whole voyage--having to avoid b.u.mping the _lower_ end of a rock the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing around the _upper_ end.

I settled down to pulling in good earnest after that rather startling revelation, trying to hold the head of the skiff just enough to the left of the eye of the wind to give her a good shoot across the current.

Luckily, I had been pretty well over toward the south bank when the wind struck. There was only about a quarter of a mile to go, but I was blown back just about the whole length of that half mile of sandy beach in making it. The last hundred yards I was rowing "all out," and it was touch-and-go as to whether the skiff was going to nose into soft sand or the lower end of a long stretch of half-submerged rocks. I was a good deal relieved when it proved to be the beach--by about twenty feet. We would have made some kind of a landing on the rocks without doubt, but hardly without giving the bottom of the boat an awful banging.

The sand proved unexpectedly soft when I jumped out upon it, but I struck firm bottom before I had sunk more than an inch or two above my boot tops and managed to drag the skiff up far enough to escape the heaviest of the wash of the waves. It was rather a sodden bundle of wet canvas that I carried out and deposited under a pine tree beyond high-water mark, but the core of it displayed considerable life after it had been extracted and set up to dry before the fire of pitchy cones that I finally succeeded in teasing into a blaze. To show Miss S---- that the storm hadn't affected my equanimity, I asked her to go on with her review of "The Great Hunger;" but she replied her own was more insistent, and reminded me that I hadn't served lunch yet. Well, rain-soaked biscuit and milk chocolate are rather difficult to take without a spoon; but a pound of California seedless raisins, if munched slowly, go quite a way with two people.

The worst of the squall was over in half an hour, and, anxious to make hay while the sun shone, I pushed off again in an endeavor to get on as far as I could before the next broadside opened up. Miss S---- and I landed at the Rowena Ferry, to catch the afternoon train back to The Dalles. She was a good s.h.i.+p-mate, and I greatly regret she had the bad luck to be my pa.s.senger on the only day I encountered a really hard blow in all of my voyage.

There was another threatening turret of black cloud beginning to train its guns as I pulled out into the stream beyond Rowena, and it opened with all the big stuff it had before I had gone a mile. While it lasted, the bombardment was as fierce as the first one. Fortunately, its ammunition ran out sooner. I kept the middle of the current this time, pulling as hard as I could against the wind. I got a thorough raking, fore-and-aft, for my temerity, but, except at the height of the wind, I managed to avoid the ignominy of being forced back against the stream.

The third squall, which opened up about three-thirty, was a better organized a.s.sault, and gave me a pretty splashy session of it. When that blow got the range of me I was just pulling along to the left of a desolate tongue of black basalt called Memaloose Island. For many centuries this rocky isle was used by the Klickatats as a burial place, which fact induced a certain Indian-loving pioneer of The Dalles, Victor Trevett by name, to order his own grave dug there. A tall marble shaft near the lower end of the island marks the spot. Now I have no objection to marble shafts in general, nor even to this one in particular--as a shaft. I just got tired of seeing it, that was all. If any skipper on the Columbia ever pa.s.sed Vic Trevett's monument as many times in a year as I did in an hour, I should like to know what run he was on.

Swathed in oilskins, my potential speed was cut down both by the resistance my augmented bulk offered to the wind and the increased difficulty of pulling with so much on. Down past the monument I would go in the lulls, and up past the monument I would go before the gusts.

There, relentless as the _Flying Dutchman_, that white shaft hung for the best part of an hour. I only hope what I said to the wind didn't disturb old Vic Trevett's sleep. Finally, a quarter of an hour's easing of the blow let me double the next point; and then it turned loose with all its guns again. Quite gone in the back and legs, I gave up the unequal fight and started to shoot off quartering toward the sh.o.r.e.

Glancing over my shoulder in an endeavour to get some kind of an idea of where, and against what, I might count on striking, an astounding sight met my eyes, a picture so weird and infernal that I had to pause (mentally) and a.s.sure myself that those raisins I had for lunch had not been "processed."

Of all the sinister landscapes I ever saw--including the lava fields of a good many volcanoes and a number of the world's most repulsive "bad lands"--that which opened up to me as I tried to head in beyond that hard-striven-for point stands alone in my memory for sheer awesomeness.

The early winter twilight had already begun to settle upon the gloomy gorge, the duskiness greatly accentuating the all-pervading murk cast upon the river by the pall of the sooty clouds. All round loomed walls of black basalt, reflecting darkly in water whose green had been completely quenched by the brooding purple shadows. The very pines on the cliffs merged in the solid opacity behind their scraggly forms, and even the fringe of willows above high-water-mark looped round the crescent of beach below like a fragment of mourning band. And that stretch of silver sand--the one thing in the whole infernal landscape whose whiteness the gloom alone could not drown: how shall I describe the jolt it gave me when I discovered that six or seven black devils were engaged in systematically spraying it with an inky liquid that left it as dark and dead to the eye as a Stygian strand of anthracite? It was a lucky thing those raisins had _not_ been "processed;" else I might not have remembered readily what I had heard of the way the "South-Bank"

railway had been keeping the sand from drifting over its tracks by spraying with crude oil the bars uncovered at low water.

With that infernal mystery cleared up, my mind was free to note and take advantage of a rather remarkable incidental phenomenon. The effect of oil on troubled waters was no new thing to me, for on a number of occasions I had helped to rig a bag of kerosene-soaked oak.u.m over the bows of a schooner hove-to in a gale; but to find a stretch of water already oiled for me at just the time and place I was in the sorest need of it--well, I couldn't see where those manna-fed Children of Israel wandering in the desert found their advance arrangements looked to any better than that. The savage wind-whipped white-caps that were buffeting me in mid-stream dissolved into foam-streaked ripples the moment they impinged upon the broadening oil-sleeked belt where the petroleum had seeped riverward from the sprayed beach. A solid jetty of stone could not have broken the rollers more effectually. On one side was a wild wallow of tossing water; on the other--as far as the surface of the river was concerned--an almost complete calm.

It was a horrible indignity to heap upon _Imshallah_ (and, after the way she had displayed her resentment following her garbage shower under the Wenatchee bridge, I knew that spirited lady would make me pay dear for it if ever she had the chance); still--dead beat as I was--there was nothing else to do but to head into that oleaginous belt of calm and make the best of it. The wind still took a deal of bucking, but with the banging of the waves at an end my progress was greatly accelerated.

Hailing the black devils on the bank, I asked where the nearest village was concealed, to learn that Moosier was a couple of miles below, but well back from the river. They rather doubted that I could find my way to the town across the mudflats, but thought it might be worth trying in preference to pus.h.i.+ng on in the dark to Hood River.

Those imps of darkness were right about the difficulty of reaching Moosier after nightfall. A small river coming in at that point seemed to have deposited a huge bar of quicksand all along the left bank, and I would never have been able to make a landing at all had not a belated duck-hunter given me a hand. After tying up to an oar, he very courteously undertook to pilot me to the town through the half-overflowed willow and alder flats. As a consequence of taking the lead, it was the native rather than the visitor who went off the caving path into the waist-deep little river. Coming out of the woods, a hundred-yards of slus.h.i.+ng across a flooded potato-patch brought us to the railway embankment, and from there it was comparatively good going to the hotel. Luckily, the latter had a new porcelain tub and running hot water, luxuries one cannot always be sure of in the smaller Columbia River towns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CITY OF PORTLAND WITH MT. HOOD IN THE DISTANCE]

It was just at the close of the local apple season, and I found the hotel br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with departing packers. Most of the latter were girls from Southern California orange-packing houses, imported for the season. Several of them came from Anaheim, and a.s.sured me that they had packed Valencias from a small grove of mine in that district. They were a good deal puzzled to account for the fact that a man with a Valencia grove should be "hobo-ing" round the country like I was, and seemed hardly to take me seriously when I a.s.sured them it was only a matter of a year or two before all farmers would be hobos. It's funny how apple-packing seems to bring out all the innate sn.o.bbery in a lady engaging in that lucrative calling; they didn't seem to think tramping was quite respectable. I slept on the parlour couch until three in the morning, when I "inherited" the room occupied by a couple of packettes departing by the Portland train. As they seem to have been addicted to "_attar of edelweiss_," or something of the kind, and there hadn't been time for fumigation, I rather regretted making the s.h.i.+ft.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGE ON COLUMBIA HIGHWAY NEAR PORTLAND, OREGON]

When I had splashed back to the river in the morning, I found that _Imshallah_ anxious to hide the shame of that oil-bath, had spent the night trying to bury herself in the quicksand. Dumping her was out of the question, and I sank mid-thigh deep two or three times myself before I could persuade the sulking minx even to take the water. I knew she would take the first chance that offered to rid herself of the filth, just as she had before; but, with no swift water above the Cascades, there seemed small likelihood of her getting out-of-hand. Knowing that she was quite equal to making a bolt over the top of that terrible cataract if she hadn't managed to effect some sort of purification before reaching there, I made an honest attempt at conciliation by landing at the first solid beach I came to and giving her oily sides a good swabbing down with a piece of carpet. That seemed to mollify the temperamental lady a good deal, but just the same I knew her too well to take any chances.