LIVINGSTON TO BIG TIMBER

As I had planned my Yellowstone-to-New-Orleans voyage as a strictly one-man trip the ruling consideration I had had in mind in ordering my outfit was lightness and compactness. I hoped also to find serviceability in combination with these other qualifications, but the latter were the things that I insisted on in advance. Serviceability could only be proved by use. So I simply combed the sporting magazine pages, picked out the lightest, tightest boat, engine, tent, sleeping bag and other stuff I needed and let it go at that for a starter. No article that I ordered was of a type I had ever used before. If anything failed to stand up under use I knew that some sort of substitute could be provided along the way. That is one distinct advantage boating on the upper Yellowstone has over tackling such a stretch as the Big Bend of the Columbia in Canada, or the remoter waters of any of the great South American, African or Asian rivers.

First and last, of course, my boat was the main consideration. I knew that I could get on with a wooden boat as a last resort, for I had handled one alone over three hundred miles of the lower Columbia the previous season. But I wanted to give at least a try-out to something lighter than wood. I was certain there would be many occasions when my ability to take my boat completely out of the water might be the means of saving it from swamping, and possibly complete destruction. I also knew there would be many places where such things as mud or too steep a slope to the bank would make this quite out of the question with a wooden boat weighing three hundred pounds or more. Lightness, also, would mean easier pulling as well as greater mileage for the same amount of engine power.

Investigation showed that the only practicable alternatives to wood were steel and canvas. Canvas is extremely light and fairly strong, and there are occasions—such as a journey on which both overland and water travel are combined—when a properly designed folding canvas boat is incomparably preferable to any other. This is the case, however, only when there are frequent and difficult portages and very considerable distances by land to be traversed. On a comparatively unbroken river voyage the softness, the lack of rigidity, of a folding canvas boat fail by a big margin to compensate for its lightness. This consideration eliminated canvas for my purpose, though I readily grant its usefulness under conditions favourable to it.

That committed me to steel. I found various types on the market, and after several weeks of writing and wiring decided to take my chance with a fourteen-foot sectional skiff put out by the Darrow Boat Company of Albion, Michigan. The model I ordered weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, according to the catalogue, and was amply stiff and strong. I was willing to take the catalogue's word on the score of weight; the matter of strength would have to be proved. The company admitted they made no boat specially designed for rough-water work, and suggested it might be best to build me one to order with a higher side. I knew that four inches more side would be better than two, but didn't feel that I could spare the ten days the job would require. That was the reason I was taking a chance with a stock model that is probably most used for duck-hunting on lakes and marshes. My only reason for ordering a sectional type was the very considerable saving in express on account of the comparatively small amount of space required for the knocked-down boat in shipment.

I must confess that my first sight of the crated boat in the express office at Livingston was a bit of a shock. There was no question about the lightness of it, to be sure—I could pick it up, crate and all with one hand. Rather, indeed, it looked to me too light. I did not see how material so thin could withstand a collision with a sharp, mid-stream boulder without puncturing. But that was of less concern to me than the lack of freeboard. After the big batteaux and Peterboros I had used on the Columbia the previous year this bright little tin craft looked like a child's toy. Nor was there any comfort in the agent's run of patter as he stood by during my inspection. All the boat people in town had been in to see it. No end of opinions about it, but all agreed on one thing—that it wouldn't do to allow it be launched in the river. No one but a lunatic would think of such a thing, of course. Still just that kind of lunatics had been turning up every now and then; so many, indeed, that there was talk of erecting some kind of a trap down Big Timber way to catch the bodies. But I didn't look like that kind of a nut. In fact, the agent was more inclined to believe that I was one of them rich fellows from St. Paul that had a hunting lodge up in the Rockies.

I had the crate in a truck by this time. The agent's face was a study when I gave the curt order: "Blacksmith shop on river—foot of Main Street." His was all old stuff, of course. I had heard some variation of it on every stream I had boated between the Yangtse and the Parana. Noah must have gone through a barrage of the same sort the day he laid the keel of the Ark. It didn't bother me a bit; but at the same time there was nothing cheering in it. As a matter of fact, I had still to make up my own mind as to just how much of the river those fourteen-inch sides were going to exclude in a really rough-tumbling rapid. However, it wasn't the sporting thing to do to abandon ship while ship was still in two pieces, one inside of the other, in a crate. I would wait at least until it was set up before arriving at any final verdicts. Perhaps I would even give it a trial in the water. There was a quiet eddy under the blacksmith shop, and I could play safe by bending on a line and having some one keep hold of it in a pinch.

Joe Evans, the curio dealer, rushed out, bareheaded, as I drove past his shop in the truck, to head me off from going to the river. A stranger could have no idea how treacherous the Yellowstone was, he urged. Two drownded in it already that week. If I must go ahead in that little tin pan of a boat, much better to ship it to Miles City or Glendive and put in below the worst rapids. From Livingston to Big Timber would be sheer suicide, especially for a tenderfoot in a duck-boat. Nobody knew that better than he did, for he had trapped all along the way. He was quite disinterested in warning me thus. Indeed, it was all in his favour to have me start. The county paid him twenty-five dollars a day for hunting for dead bodies in the river, with twenty-five more as bonus for every one he found. So I would see it was all to his interest to increase the spring crop of floaters; but he was a humane man, and—Thus Joe, at some length and with considerable vehemence.

I was chuckling to myself all the time Joe rattled on. The priceless old chap had been in business at the same stand twenty years ago, but it was plain he did not recognize me as the first-baseman of the Livingston champeen nine. As a matter of fact, I was just as glad that he didn't—right there before the truck-driver at least. For I had some recollection of having been with our brake-beam-riding right fielder the evening "Lefty" Clancy tried to palm a moss agate out of one of Joe's trays—and got caught. Joe made "Lefty" disgorge, and then delivered himself of remarks more pointed than polite respecting the morals of Livingston's imported ball-players.

As I have intimated, I didn't care to have that episode dragged out before the truck-driver, who might have passed it right on to Pete Holt and Editor Phillips. So I just sat tight for the moment, thanked Joe for his warnings and drove on when he got out of breath. But late that afternoon I went to his shop and made a clean breast of everything. I confessed about the moss agate, and also to the fact that I was the youth who held the steering paddle for Sydney Lamartine the time the still unbroken river record of six hours to Big Timber was put up. Then we both grinned, shook hands and apologized to each other. I apologized to Joe for seeming to have aided and abetted "Lefty" in trying to get away with the moss agate, and Joe apologized to me for that warning about the Yellowstone. There was a delicate and subtle compliment in his handsome admission that he felt that his was the greater wrong, even allowing for the fact that there were still two or three moss agates missing when he finally checked over the tray. In this latter connection, Joe said that for a year or two he had the feeling that he had made a tactical error in not turning out my pockets as well as "Lefty's" when he made his search. Then, one day, "Lefty" came in and sold him back the agates. "I didn't say anything," said Joe with a chuckle. "Just paid him a dollar apiece for the streakies, and then turned about and sold him for ten dollars an old Colt's that had laid under the snow all winter and wasn't worth six-bits. It seemed to me the kinder way," he concluded.

Of course a man of so mellow and inclusive a charity as that was easy for me to become fond of. Joe and I made friends quickly, and he fell in very readily with the plan to go along in his canvas boat when I started and help Pete Holt look for the two floaters.

Ten minutes sufficed to knock off the crate and set the boat up on the floor of the blacksmith shop. It consisted of a bow and a stern section, each about seven feet in length and provided with a thwart and a water-tight compartment. Indeed, each section was really a complete boat in itself, awkward in shape, to be sure, yet something that would float on an even keel and which could be propelled by oars or paddles. Bolting these two sections together produced a fourteen-foot skiff of astonishingly good lines. The sides, it is true, were inches lower than I would liked to have had them, but there was something distinctly heartening in the fine flare of the bows and the pronounced sheer of the little craft. Heartening, also, was the comment of the helper working to patch up a gunwale smashed in transit. He said it was the darndest hard tin he ever tried to put a drill through. Equally reassuring was the blacksmith's complaint over the trouble he was having in hammering out a number of little dents. I may as well add here that that transit-crushed gunwale was the worst scar my pretty tin toy was to show when I docked it finally in St. Louis after bumping something like 2500 miles down the Yellowstone and Missouri. The bright little shallop looked so inherently water-worthy that I dragged it down to the river and jumped in without further misgivings. Its lightness was highly refreshing, especially when I remembered the back-breaking job it had been dragging for only a few feet the wooden skiff I had used on the lower Columbia. Built to be pulled from the forward section, carrying its load aft, it was down heavily by the head until I trimmed ship by taking in the blacksmith. My own sodden two hundred and forty pounds still brought it a bit too low by the bows, but I readily saw how the weight of my outfit and ballast would correct this until I shipped my outboard motor at Bismarck. The trial was eminently satisfactory. I dodged back and forth across the current, ran a short riffle, and then swung round and pulled right back up through it. Some water was shipped, but not enough to bother. There would be no dearth of dampness in the real rapids, I could see; but those air-chambers should float her through in one way or another, and water was easily dumped at the first eddy.

When, on pulling up to the bank to land, I tossed the painter to some one waiting below the blacksmith shop, I acknowledged the proper sex of the little craft for the first time. "Catch the line and ease her in!" was what I said, or something to that effect. That meant she had convinced me that she was a regular fellow—that I was quite game to trust myself out alone with her day or night. And that is just what I did, and for something like sixty or seventy days and nights. Saucy and spirited, and at times wilful, as she proved to be, that confidence was never betrayed.

Late that afternoon Pete Nelson called on me at the hotel, heading a delegation from the Park County Chamber of Commerce with the request that I permit the name of Livingston, Montana, to be painted upon my boat. Pete's inherent delicacy must have made him sense the fact that operating as a sandwich-man in any form was the one thing above all others from which my shrinking nature recoiled. Turning his hat nervously in his hands, the spokesman went on to explain and expatiate.

"Livingston was also the name of a great explorer. You're a sort of explorer yourself, boy. Kind of appropriate to unite the two ideas. Would also let the folks down river know that the little old town was right on the map. Full of enterprise, too, sending its emissaries on 4000-mile river voyages...."

"Back up, Pete," I cut in. "This little voyage is my own idea, not Livingston's. But go to it with the paint if you really think it will turn any settlers this way. This little old town gave me my start in life, and I am not going to lay myself open to the charge of ingratitude, no matter at what cost to my personal feelings. Only please don't insist on my flying a pennant or wearing a cap with the city slogan on it. What is the motto, by the way?"

"Live Lively in Livingston!" chanted the delegation in unison, as though delivering itself of a college yell. Pete opined it was a good slogan, with a lot of multum in parvo about it; but of course, if that was the way I felt....

The delegation bowed itself out and adjourned to a sign-painter's shop to discuss the practical side of the affair now that the diplomatic preliminaries were disposed of. The next morning I found "LIVINGSTON, MONT." streaming in bold capitals along port and starboard bows and across the stern of my argosy. The blacksmith said there had been some discussion anent blazoning the words in foot-high letters the whole length of the bottom, on the theory, it appears, that this would be the most conspicuous part of the boat in the event it capsized and continued on to New Orleans without its skipper. Whether they really carried out that inspired plan I never learned. The first sand bar I hit below Livingston would have effectually erased the letters in any event. Indeed, I was only too happy to find that it hadn't scoured a hole through the bottom itself.

We had planned to push off by nine o'clock of the morning of June thirtieth, but various odds and ends of delays and interruptions held us over an hour. Most of these were in the form of elderly ladies who had lost near relatives in the river and chose this as the fitting occasion to tell me about it. I have some recollection of speaking with a friend or connection of Sydney Lamartine. Sydney had died from some cause I made out, but whether from the river or not I did not learn. Some one else chimed in with a boat-upset story just at that juncture and things got a bit mixed. I was mighty sorry to hear about Lamartine, though. He pulled a strong oar and had no end of nerve—real river stuff.

When I came to ask the blacksmith how much I owed him, he scratched his head for a few moments and then asked if I thought a dollar would be too much. As the boat had been around his shop three or four days, with himself or a helper tinkering on little things about it much of the time out of pure kindliness, I told him I did not think it was and asked him to let me take his picture for fear I should never find another like him. I needn't have worried on that score, however. From first to last, practically all of the people I had to do with along each of the three great rivers I navigated had to be pressed before they would take any pay at all for services. Indeed, I recall but two who seriously tried to put anything over. One was the clerk of the local Ritz-Carlton at Billings, who tried to charge me two days' rent for a room I had occupied but one, and the other was a farmer's wife near Sibley, Missouri, who was going to collect twenty-five cents from me for a quart of skim milk. In the latter instance the husband of the offender came along in time to intervene in my behalf and give the woman a good tongue-lashing for trying to cheat a "po stranghah who wasn't no low down tramp no how and maybe was writin' fo the papahs." In the former case the "po stranghah" found justice denied him until he actually had to prove that he occasionally did write for the "papahs." I wouldn't have recalled either of these instances if they had chanced in the course of an ordinary trip, for the very good reason there would have been so many others of the same kind that my memory would not have compassed them all. I have remembered them, and gone to the trouble of mentioning them here, because that sort of thing isn't general practice along the river-road.

Just before starting, and purely as a gesture, I offered Pete Holt the use of my Gieve inflatable life-preserver jacket. This handy little garment I had worn in the North Sea during the war, and it had also stood me in good stead on the Columbia the previous Fall. Now I was really very keen for its reassuring embrace myself on that first day's run, and if I had thought Holt would take it I would never have offered it. When he rose to that jacket like a hungry trout to a fly I felt toward him about as one does toward a man who asks you to say "When"—and then stops pouring when you do say it. I had no legitimate complaint of course. It was entirely my own fault. Just the same, the unlucky denouement cramped my style from the outset. I had intended giving Pete a deliberate spill in some safe-looking rapid just to pay him for a few things he had done to me with the ski. I gave up the idea entirely now. That "doughnut" of air under his arms meant that he would probably bob through with dry hair while I serpentined over and under an oar. It also meant that he was going to worry a lot less about the state of the water than I hoped he would, for auld lang syne, that is. It also meant that I was going to worry rather more. It was an unfortunate move on my part altogether. Subject to that self-imposed handicap I think I did pretty well. I am sure Pete would have confessed that night that there were two or three new kinds of thrills in the world that he wotted not of before, even though that confounded "doughnut" must have acted as a good deal of a shock-absorber throughout.

Joe Evans, pushing off in his canoe from the dock of his river home a couple of hundred yards below, gave the signal for casting off. The current caught the bow as the honest blacksmith relinquished the painter and the boat swung quickly into the stream. Some boys raised a spattering cheer, the people who had lost relatives and friends in the river shook their heads dubiously, and Pete Nelson, raising three fingers aloft, shouted: "Here's luck!" He seemed a good deal elated because the Chief of Police was going away.

We were off—or nearly so. When I turned from the crowd's acclaim to con ship I discovered a good thick stream of green water slopping in, now over one quarter, now over the other. And whichever side it splashed from, Pete was getting the full benefit of it. "I hate to start crabbing at this stage, Skipper," he said with a wry grin, "but it's that confounded ballast of yours that's doing it. It's putting her rails right under."

I squinted critically down the port gunwale; then down the starboard. When she rode on an even keel either rail was a good two inches above water. But when she lurched in even the gentlest swell, one rail or the other went a good inch under. "You're right," I acquiesced. "Heave it over." One by one the units of that precious pile of junk from the blacksmith shop scrap-heap went to the bottom—a Ford axle, a mower gear, the frame of a harrow, some fragments of "caterpillar" tractor tracks, the drive wheel of a sewing machine. All of two hundred pounds of choice assorted scrap Pete heaved over, keeping but a single hunk of rusty iron that I thought I might use for an anchor at night in avoiding some pernicious stretch of mosquito coast on the lower river. She still rode low, but trimmed perfectly as soon as Pete finished bailing.

All down through the town they were waving us kindly farewells from the bank, and at the H Street bridge, where "Buckskin Jim" Cutler had been picked up the night before, we ran the gauntlet of another crowd. Then the people began to thin out and we had the river to ourselves. With the main channel streaming white a few hundred yards ahead I settled to the oars for the sharp initiatory test I knew awaited us there. We had closed up to within fifty feet of Joe by now, and saw for the first time the remarkable precautionary measures he had taken to insure the safety of himself and his canoe. For himself he had a blown-up football tied to the back of his belt, an arrangement very similar to the block of wood Chinese houseboat dwellers tie to their boy, though not to their comparatively worthless girl, children. Along both gunwales of the canoe were further air installations—these in the form of long lengths of inflated inner tubes. The practical worth of the latter contrivances was to be proved inside of half a minute. Of the efficacy of a football tied to the back of the belt as a life-preserver I had some doubts. It seemed to me, however, that the elevation of that particular section of the anatomy could only be secured at the cost of putting the head under water. Not being quite sure, I deemed it best not to shake Joe's confidence by telling him of my doubts.

The Yellowstone divides a half mile or so above the Main Street bridge, not far from the point where Jim Cutler was knocked from his raft. The northerly channel, flowing by Livingston has perhaps a third of the volume of the southerly one. The two unite not far below the H Street bridge. In doing a bit of advance scouting down stream a day or two previously I made particular mental note of a point, just below the confluence, at which the current drove with great force close to the left bank. Here, either snags or slightly submerged boulders made a messy stretch of water that I saw at a glance it would not do to get a boat into. However, a good sharp pull across the current from the point the main channel was entered would be enough to avoid trouble—if nothing went wrong.

The currents of the respective channels came together almost at right angles, that of the main one flowing at perhaps eight miles an hour. Ordinarily I would have eased into this by running parallel to it and conforming my course to the direction of the stronger current. In my anxiety to get quick way on across the current, however, I did not take the time to do this. On the contrary, indeed, pulling as hard as I could, I drove the light skiff almost head-on into the swiftly speeding green bolt of the main current. The effect, naturally, was something like that of a man's walking into the side of a moving street car. The boat did precisely what a man walking into a car would do—went reeling and staggering sideways in an effort to keep from rolling over and over. She spun round twice before I got her under control, and of course shipped a lot of green water—all of it in Holt's section. It wasn't enough to bother much, though, and I had no trouble in pulling clear of the danger point with yards to spare. Holt went quietly to bailing. I was conscious of a mild thrill of elation at the thought of the sousing I was giving him in spite of the "doughnut," but he didn't seem to be worrying about it quite as much as I would have liked.

There was less excuse for Joe's having trouble at this point, because it was almost in his back yard—one of his favourite fishing riffles, in fact. It may be that the fact that I was crowding him closely from behind made him nose into the main channel faster than he would have done had he been on his own. I was too busy with my own troubles to see what happened to him, so could only judge from the tremolo of his high-keyed cursing. Holt, however, who had a grandstand seat for the twin performances, said that the canvas canoe was thrown just about on its beams' ends, and that nothing but the newly installed water-line air-chambers, prevented a complete swamping.

The bend below the Northern Pacific bridge was one of the two or three places of which I seemed to have retained much of a mental picture from my previous run. Twenty years before the main channel was cutting heavily into a low bluff on the left, bringing down an enormous quantity of big round boulders. The short, savage riffle formed by these had given us our first severe mauling on that earlier ride. Now I found the river had broadened greatly, pouring a shallow current through a channel two or three hundred yards wide. But it was still swift, very swift—altogether relentless in its onward urge. It is the almost complete absence of slack-water stretches that differentiates the five hundred miles of the Yellowstone between Gardiner and Glendive from any other great river I can recall. It is this that makes it so nearly ideal for boating.

It didn't take us long to discover that as a pilot Joe was not an asset. Personally he was a source of never-ending delight; also artistically. His funny little craft with its inner-tube bilge keels, no less than the bobbing of that football life-preserver, lent touches to the picture that could have been blocked in by no other media. But what made Joe's piloting fail to qualify was the fact that instead of trying to find the channel he was trying to find floaters—to earn one or both of those twenty-five-dollar rewards that were offered for the finding of the bodies of the people drowned the previous week. I wanted all the deep, clear, unobstructed channel there was to be had; the very nature of Joe's quest kept him edging in toward snags and bars and shallows. These little incidentals didn't bother him a bit. The instant he saw the water shoaling dangerously he simply jumped overboard, grabbed his feather-weight craft by the nose and trotted right out on dry land.

Now this wouldn't have troubled seriously if—save the mark!—I had also been using an unladen canvas canoe. But with my outfit, a passenger, and a boat whose ability to withstand collisions with rocks and snags had still to be proved, Joe's little jump-out, pick-up and trot-off manoeuvre was a difficult one to follow. Twice, because there was no alternative either time, I did the best I could to go through his motions. All I succeeded in doing—besides getting pulled down and rolled—was proving that the bottom of my boat would bang for fifty feet over shallowly submerged rocks without holing. While that latter was reassuring, I couldn't see any reason for going on and proving it over and over again. If the constant drop of water wears away the hardest stone it seemed perfectly reasonable to believe that the constant biff of boulders might batter through the hardest bottom. And I wanted that bottom to do me for from twenty-five to thirty-five hundred miles yet.

That was the reason why when, entangled in a maze of shoaling channels, Joe picked up his canoe and trotted up on a bar for the third time, I had the corner of a wild-weather eye lifting for a possible gateway of escape. A short, sharp chute cascading off to the right seemed to fill the bill, but by a narrow squeeze. A rough tumble of green-white water drove full at a caving gravel bank, reared up and fell over on its back in a curling wave, serpentined between the out-reaching claws formed by the roots of two prostrate cottonwood trees, and then recovered from its tantrum in a diminuendo of whirlpools in the embrasure of a brown cliff. It was the kind of a place which you knew you could run if all went right, but which you usually didn't try for fear that one of a half dozen things might go wrong. I should hardly have tackled it in cold blood, even in a boat I was thoroughly used to; but I had just enough dander up over the prospect of another bumping on Joe's bar to be just a bit careless of consequences. It was that sort of "Might-as-well-be-hanged-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb" feeling that a man ought to eliminate from his system as a first step in fitting himself for work in rough water. It had always troubled me a bit, but I had it sufficiently in check to keep it from asserting itself unless I was very tired or slightly huffed. This time, I fear, there was just a bare ruffle of huffiness easing the brake of my wonted restraint.

I was over the dip at the head of that chute before I knew it—likewise, out into the swirls at the foot of it. I was conscious only of a sudden dive, the loom of the back-curling wave—which the skiff, heeling half over, was taking as a racing car round a steeply-banked turn,—a tangle of roots to left and right, and then the serpentining through the whirlpools. She had hardly shipped a bucket of solid water—most of it over her bows as she tipped off the curling wave.

Joe was quite handsome above having his pilotage flaunted. The first thing he did after catching up with us was to apologize again for having warned about running the upper river. The good chap seemed really to think that some skill had been displayed in running that chute. As a matter of fact, I simply headed in and let the current do the rest. Pete said I backed water sharply to keep from ramming the gravel bank, and that we both fended with oars against the clutch of the cottonwood snags. Pete also said I was pop-eyed all the way through. I know that he was. I was glad of it, too. Outside of a straight spill, I felt that there wasn't going to be much more that I could do to shake those confoundedly cool scout-trained nerves of his.

This little incident clarified the air on the pilotage question. I let Joe keep the lead as far as I could, but assumed the responsibility of picking my own channel while he concentrated on his quest.

We passed several grim reminders of the tragedies of the past week. A few miles below Livingston we came upon Jim Cutler's raft stranded upon a midstream bar. Even a passing glimpse revealed how well the double tiers of logs were laid—plainly the work of the real old river-rat "Buckskin Jim" must have been. Not far below the raft was the wreck of a Ford, with cushions, wraps, and odds and ends of a camp outfit dotting the bars for the next mile or two. The car, occupied by a young Middle Westerner and his four-months' bride, had gone over the grade at a bend of the road not far above where we saw the wreck. Rolling to the flood-swollen river, it had been carried several hundred yards down stream before stranding. The man crawled clear and reached the bank; the body of his wife had not been recovered. The third recent river tragedy was that of a rancher, but I had not learned the details of it.

I was, of course, much elated over the way in which my little tin boat had behaved in running that side-winding chute. This very smart performance proved conclusively that, with anything like intelligent handling, she would be more than equal to any probable demands I would have to make on her. There might, of course, be places that I would have to avoid on account of her lack of freeboard, but that, at the worst, would mean no more than the loss of a bit of time. She was good for what she would have to do—that was the main thing. There was reassurance, also, in the way her bottom and sides had withstood the bumping from the rocks. There was no question in my mind now that that galvanized tin-like looking stuff was real steel. Nothing else would have stood the bumps. I planned to spare her all that kind of thing I could, but it was good to know that she could stand the gaff if she had to. I was calling her pet names before we had gone twenty miles. It is an astonishing thing the affection a man develops for a boat that is carrying him well on a long river journey.

The thing that I remembered best from my former run was the long, rough rapid that winds down and under the Springdale bridge. I did not recall, however, that the river divided into two channels a half mile above the bridge. Indeed, it is quite possible that it did not do so twenty years ago. Changes like that occur over night during the high-water season on the Yellowstone. Joe led the way down the left-hand side of the left-hand channel, but landed when it became apparent that neither of our boats could live in the wild tumble of rollers where the current drove hard against the side of the bluff above the bridge. Lining back a quarter of a mile up-stream, we pulled across to the opposite side, down which there was rough but fairly open running.

My boat was behaving so well that I couldn't resist the temptation to give her a baptism in some really rough stuff at a point where salvage operations would be so comparatively simple in case of grief. Giving the little lady her head after the worst of the riffle had been passed, I let the undercurrent draw her right over into the main string of rollers. Wild, wallowing water it was, solid white all the way, but with a straight run and no underhand look about it. She took it like a duck, except where two or three of the most broken combers let her down too sharply for her bows to rise to meet the next in turn. There were perhaps a half dozen buckets of water in the forward section when we beached and dumped her a hundred yards below the bridge. As I seem to remember it now, Syd Lamartine's skiff had a foot of water in it when we dumped at about the same point on that other run. On that occasion, however, I have a clear recollection of riding the middle of the riffle all the way down. I should want a batteau and a full crew if I were going to try the same stunt today.

It must have been six or seven miles below the Springdale bridge that Holt, descrying an unusual object on the beach of a long, low island to our left, asked me to pull in closer for a better look. Joe, a hundred yards ahead of us, had already passed it up as a log of driftwood, but the ex-scout's keen eye would not be deceived. At first we thought it was the body of a man—probably the drowned rancher,—but as we drew nearer it was revealed as that of a woman dressed in hiking garb, undoubtedly the bride of the auto wreck.

As we were now in Sweet Grass County, the body was under the jurisdiction of the Coroner at Big Timber. Holt decided it would be best if Joe tried to find some ranch from which he could get in touch with that official by phone, while we continued on down river to carry the word by an alternative route.

Joe was treated to a good deal of a shock while towing the body down stream to an eddy from which it could be landed on the left bank. No sooner had he put off from the beach than the corpse, floating deeply submerged at the end of a thirty-foot line, made straight for the roaring line of rollers on the right side of the channel. As it was a good deal too rough water for his boat to ride, Joe lost no time in bending to his stubby oars and pulling for dear life in the opposite direction. It was a tug-of-war all the way, with the grisly tow on the outer end gaining foot by foot. Holt and I had drifted too far ahead before we realized the seriousness of Joe's difficulty to be of any help. As an upset was inevitable in the event the canoe was dragged into the riffle stern first, the best that we could do was to pick him up at the foot of it and trust that his canoe would strand and anchor the corpse.

If that riffle had been fifty yards longer nothing in the world could have prevented a spill that would have put Joe's football life-preserver to a real test. As far as the tug-of-war was concerned he was beaten completely—dragged over the line. Luckily it was only the smoothening tail of the riffle, and the buoyant little canoe rode the rounded rollers without capsizing. Another hundred yards, and the relentless drag from the other end of his line had eased enough to allow him to pull up and into the eddy. He was mighty white about the gills as Holt gave him a hand ashore, and kept repeating over and over in an awed voice: "Did you see her try to drown me? Did you see her try to drown me?"

It was easy enough to understand what the trouble had been as soon as one gave it a moment's collected thought. Calm reflection, however, was a thing which I am inclined to think very few men would have been capable of in Joe's place. As a matter of fact, indeed, neither Holt nor I was in a sufficiently detached frame of mind to dope out the phenomenon until some minutes after Joe had landed. This was the reason for what happened:

In every swiftly flowing channel there is a strong draw toward the most rapidly moving part of the current, and this draw is usually more powerful below than at the surface. A boat paddled in comparatively smooth water beside a riffle will invariably be drawn into the latter within a few yards if allowed to drift. Only too often, in fact, it will be drawn in despite every effort to avoid the riffle. In this particular instance, the deeply floating corpse had given the inward-drawing current a double hold, and Joe's short oars had not been able to develop power enough to counteract it. Readily explicable as the uncanny incident was, there was no question of the grim seriousness of it. Indeed, I have always thought of it as a battle with Death in more senses than one, for that football float of Joe's, attached as it was, would have been about as much use as a life-preserver, once he was dumped out into that riffle, as a millstone round his neck.

Holt and I made good time for the remainder of the run to Big Timber—about three hours for something like twenty-five miles. The way was a continuous succession of moderate rapids, with one very rough and savage cascade. The latter was not far above Big Timber, and was formed by a ledge of bedrock extending all the way across the river. A direct drop of two or three feet here was followed by a series of stiff riffles that extended out of sight round a sharp bend where the river was deflected at right-angles by an abrupt cliff. I never learned the name of the place, but it was a distinctly nasty one—just one damn thing after another, as Pete put it. I have jumbled memories of messing up on the ledge, and then half swamping just below it, on my former run.

Not to take too many chances in the deepening twilight (though all we'd admit to each other at the time was that we were doing it to avoid wetting my outfit), we lined by the sharp pitch and on down almost to the bend. Even from there it was right sloppy going, partly through some rather clumsy handling the skiff had as a consequence of a sudden divergence of theory Pete and I developed on the subject of rapid running.

Rounding the sharp bend the skiff was drawn into the middle of a rough, foam-white riffle that extended ahead as far as I could see. The unrhythmically wallowing rollers were banging her bows unmercifully and throwing water aboard at a rate that I feared would swamp her very quickly if she continued to head into them. Seeing that the water toward the right bank was a bit less broken, I laid onto my oars for all that was in me in an effort to throw her in that direction. Holt was grunting mightily. Looking ahead over my shoulder, I could not see what he was doing, but assumed he was paddling his head off in seconding my effort to reach smoother water. But not a yard could I move her from the crest of that white-capped ridge of rollicking combers. Down the whole length of the riffle she slammed, dipping water at every plunge and finishing with a good six inches swishing about in both sections.

Just about at the last gasp from my frantic but futile pulling, I let my oars trail and my head sag down between my knees while my heart stopped hop-skip-and-a-jumping and my breath came back. Looking up a half minute later to see if there was anything ahead that would demand expert attention, I saw that Pete was just coming out of a collapse similar to my own. Also he was choking toward utterance.

"Took all I had in me,—but I did it," he gasped with a sickly grin.

"Did what?" I growled.

"Kept you from throwing her side-on and giving me that spill you promised," he chuckled. "Don't you think it's getting too late in the evening for that kind of jokes?"

Oh, well! The warehouses and the water-tanks of the Big Timber bluff were beginning to blot the evening sky ahead, and so I hardly thought it worth while to explain to Pete that his fancied self-defensive measures had probably brought him nearer to that promised spill than he had been at any time during the day. He wouldn't have believed me anyhow. Won't even do so when he reads it here in cold print.

Pulling up a slough that ran back from the head of the bluff, we found safe haven under the over-arching willows of a wonderfully cold and clear little creek. Pushing out onto the bank above, we found ourselves in the back yard of the local postmaster. A highly gracious and comely young lady volunteered to mend my Gieve waistcoat, torn by Pete's frantic paddlings over and roundabout the inflated "doughnut." The Gieve is not made to paddle in.

Wolfing great porterhouse steaks and quaffing steaming mugs of coffee, Pete and I sat long at a lunch-counter table and talked of our ancient ski jaunt over the snows of the Yellowstone. He spoke much of coasting and jumping and spills—especially of spills that I took. Just why he did this didn't occur to me until after he had left for Livingston by the midnight train. I figured it out walking back to the hotel. It was merely the subtle chap's way of letting me know that he still reckoned I was a bit in his debt on the score of thrills and spills. Maybe so. Maybe so. Twenty-year thrills more readily than forty-year, just as forty-year is more reluctant to take a chance at a spill.