The River and I Part 9

And then suddenly and without shock--like the s.h.i.+fting of the wood smoke--the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. s.p.a.ce and eternity were I--vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.

Bill snored. Among the glowing fires moved the black bulk of the Kid, turning the hunks of venison. And then the universe and I, curiously mixed, swooned into nothing at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow, and from the river came a shouting.

It was broad day. We leaped up, and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, saw a light skiff drifting toward us. It contained two men--Frank and Charley. We had met them at Benton, and during an acquaintance of three weeks we had learned of their remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling--and their G.o.d was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one month in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly incurable disease--_Wanderl.u.s.t_.

So we had agreed that somewhere down river we would camp for a week and wait for them. They would do the cooking, and we would take them in tow.

Two days after we dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly "jumped" an unfinished job and put off after us in a skiff, rowing all day and most of the night in order to overtake us.

Certainly they had arrived at the moment most psychologically favorable for the beginning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed. Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in the making of flapjacks. According to his nave statement, he had discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left too much to the imagination. For these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed the newcomers.

Ten minutes after the skiff touched sh.o.r.e, the camp consisted of two cooks and three scullions. The Kid was a hewer and packer of wood, I was a peeler and slicer of things, and Bill, sweetly oblivious of his bewhiskered dignity, danced about in the humblest of moods, handing this and that to the grub-lords.

"You outfitted like greenhorns!" announced the usurpers. "What you want is raw material. Run down to the boat, please, and bring me this! Oh, yes, and bring me that! And you'll find the other in the bottom of the skiff's forward locker! Put a little more wood on the fire, Kid; and say, Bill, hand me that, won't you? Who's going to get a pail of water?"

All three of us were going to get a pail of water, of course! It was the one thing in the world we wanted to do very much--get a pail of water!

But the raw materials--how they played on them! I regarded their performance as a species of duet; and the raw materials, ranged in the sand about the fire, were the keys. Frank touched this, Charley touched that, and over the fire the music grew--perfectly stomach-ravis.h.i.+ng!

We had bought with much care all, or nearly all the ordinary cooking-utensils. These the usurpers scorned. Three or four gasoline cans, transformed by a jack-knife into skillets, ovens, platters, etc., sufficed for these masters of their craft. The downright Greek simplicity of their methods won me completely.

"This is indeed Art," thought I; "first, the elimination of the non-essential, and then the virile, unerring directness, the seemingly easy accomplishment resulting from effort long forgotten; and, above all, the final, convincing delivery of the goods."

Out of the chaos of the raw material, beneath the touch of Charley's wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake into the air, making it execute a joyful somersault, and catching it with a sizzling _splat_ in the pan, just as the lilting measure ceased abruptly.

Why, I could taste that song in the pancakes!

I wonder why domestic economy has so persistently overlooked the value of song as an adjunct to cookery. _Gateaux a la chansonnette!_ Who wouldn't eat them for breakfast?

At six in the evening we put off, Charley, the Kid and I manning the power boat, Bill and Frank the skiff, which was towed by a thirty-foot line. I had, during the day, transformed my unquestioned slavery into a distinct advantage, having carefully impressed upon the Englishman the honor I would do him by allowing him to become chief engineer of the _Atom_. I carefully avoided the subject of cranking. I was tired cranking. I felt that I had exhausted the possibilities of enjoyment in that particular form of physical exercise. It had developed during the day that Charley had once run a gasoline engine. I was careful to emphasize my ridiculous lack of mechanical ability. Charley took the bait beautifully.

But just now the engine ran merrily. Above its barking I sang the praises of the Englishman, with a comfortable feeling that, at least in this, the tail would wag the dog.

Through the clear quiet waters, between soaring canyon walls, we raced eastward into the creeping twilight. Here and there the banks widened out into valleys of wondrous beauty, flanked by jagged miniature mountains transfigured in the slant evening light. It seemed the "faerie land forlorn" of which Keats dreamed, where year after year come only the winds and the rains and the snow and the sunlight and the star-sheen and the moon-glow.

In the deepening evening our widening V-shaped wake glowed with opalescent witch-fires. Watching the oily ripples, I steered wild and lost the channel. We all got out and, wading in different directions, went hunting for the Missouri River. It had flattened out into a lake three or four hundred yards wide and eight inches deep. Slipping poles under the power boat, we carried it several hundred yards to a point where the stream deepened. It was now quite dark, and the engine quit work for the day. The skiff towed us another mile or so to a camping place.

Having moored the boats, we lined up on the sh.o.r.e and had a song. It was a quintet, consisting of a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Irishman, a Cornishman, and a German. A very strong quintet it was; that is to say, strong on volume. As to quality--we weren't thrusting ourselves upon an audience. The river and the sky didn't seem to mind, and the cliffs sang after us, lagging a beat or two.

We wished to sing ever so beautifully; and, after all, it would be much better to have the whole world wis.h.i.+ng to sing melodiously, than to have just a few masters here and there who really can! Did you ever hear a barefooted, freckle-faced plowboy singing powerfully and quite out of tune, the stubble fields about him still glistening with the morning dew, and the meadow larks joining in from the fence-posts? I have: and soaring above the faulty execution, I heard the lark-heart of the never-aging world wooing the far-off eternal dawn. True song is merely a hopeful condition of the soul. And so I am sure we sang very wonderfully that night.

And how the flapjacks disappeared as a result of that singing! We ate until Charley refused to bake any more; then we rolled up in our blankets by the fire and "swapped lies," dropping off one at a time into sleep until the last speaker finished his story with only the drowsy stars for an audience. At least I suppose it was so; I was not the last speaker.

Alas! too seldom were we to hail the evening star with song. So far we had made in a week little more than one hundred and fifty miles. With the exception of a few hours of head winds, that week had been a week of dream. We now awoke fully to the fact that in low water season the Missouri is not swift. In our early plans we had fallen in with the popular fallacy that one need only cut loose and let the current do the rest; whereas, in low water, one would probably never reach the end of his journey by that method. In addition to this, our gasoline was running low. We had trusted to irrigation plants for replenis.h.i.+ng our supply from time to time. But the great flood of the spring had swept the valley clean. Where the year before there were prosperous ranch establishments with gasoline pumping plants, there was only desolation now. It was as though we traveled in the path of a devastating army.

Perhaps the summer of 1908 was the most unfavorable season for such a trip in the last fifty years. Steamboating on the upper river is only a memory. There are now no wood-yards as formerly. We found ourselves with no certainty of procuring grub and oil; our engine became more and more untrustworthy; our paddles had been lost. What winds we had generally blew against us, and the character of the banks was changing. The cliffs gave way to broad alluvial valleys, over which, at times, the gales swept with terrific force.

Our map told us of a number of river "towns." We had already been partially disillusioned as to the character of those "towns." They were pretty much in a cla.s.s with Goodale, except that they lacked the switch and the box-car and the sign. Just now Rocky Point lay ahead of us.

Rocky Point meant a new supply of food and oil. Stimulated by this thought, Charley cranked heroically under the blistering sun and managed to arouse the engine now and then into spasms of speed. He had not yet begun to swear. Fearfully I awaited the first evidence of the new mood, which I knew must come.

At least once a day we put the machinery on the operating table. Each time we succeeded only in developing new symptoms.

At a point about fifty miles from the "town" so deeply longed for, a lone cow-punch appeared on the bank.

"How far to Rocky Point?" I cried.

"Oh, something less than two hundred miles!" drawled the horseman. (How carelessly they juggle with miles in that country!)

"It's just a little place, isn't it?" I continued.

"Little place!" answered the cow-puncher; "h.e.l.l, no!"

"What!" I cried in glee; "Is it really a town of importance?" I had visions of a budding metropolis, full of gasoline and grub.

"I guess it ain't a little place," explained the rider; "_w'y, they've got nigh onto ten thousand cattle down there_!"

Ten minutes after that, Charley, after a desperate but unsuccessful fit of cranking, straightened the kink out of his back, mopped the perspiration from his face--_and swore_!

Almost immediately I felt, or at least thought I felt, a distinct change in the temper of the crew--for the worse. We used the better part of two days covering the last fifty miles into Rocky Point, only to find that the place consisted of a log ranch-house, two women, an old man, and "Texas." The cattle and the other men were scattered over a hundred miles or so of range. The women either would not or could not supply us with grub, explaining that the nearest railroad town was ninety miles away. Gasoline was out of the question. We might be able to buy some at the mouth of Milk River, _two hundred miles down stream_!

"Texas," who made me think of Gargantua, and who had a chest like a bison bull's, and a drawling fog-horn voice, ran a saloon in an odd little shanty boat brought down by the flood. He solved the problem for us.

"You cain't get no gasoline short o' Milk River," he bellowed drawlingly; "and you sure got to paddle, so you better buy whisky!"

While we were deciding to accept the offered advice, "Texas" whittled a stick and got off a few jokes of Rabelaisian directness. We laughed heartily, and as a mark of his appreciation, he gave us five quarts for a gallon. Which proved, in spite of his appearance, that "Texas" was very human.

We gave the engine a final trial. It ran by spasms--backwards. Then, finally, it refused to run at all. We tried to make ourselves believe that the gasoline was too low in the tank, that the pressure of the oil had something to do with it. At first we really knew better. But days of drudgery at the paddles transformed the makes.h.i.+ft hope into something almost like a certainty.

There was no lumber at Rocky Point. We rummaged through a pile of driftwood and found some half-rotted two-by-sixes. These we hacked into paddles. They weighed, when thoroughly soaked, at least fifteen pounds apiece.

Sending Bill and Frank on ahead with the skiff and the small store of provisions, Charley and I, the Kid at the steering rope, set out pus.h.i.+ng the power canoe with the paddles. The skiff was very soon out of sight.

The _Atom_, very fast under power, was, with paddles, the slowest boat imaginable. There was no lift to her prow, no exhilarating leap as with the typical light canoe driven by regulation paddles. And she was as unwieldy as a log. A light wind blew up-stream, and the current was very slow. After dark we caught up with Bill and Frank, who had supper waiting. I had been tasting venison all day; but there was none for supper. In spite of a night's smoking, all of it had spoiled. This left us without meat. Our provisions now consisted mostly of flour. We had a few potatoes and some toasted wind called "breakfast food." During six or seven hours of hard work at the paddles, we had covered no more than fifteen miles. These facts put together gave no promising result. In addition to this, it was impossible to stir up a song. Even the liquor wouldn't bring it out. And the flapjacks were not served _a la chansonnette_ that night. I tried to explain why the trip was only beginning to get interesting; but my words fell flat. And when the irrepressible Kid essayed a joke, I alone laughed at it, though rather out of grat.i.tude than mirth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WALKING" BOATS OVER SHALLOWS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TYPICAL UPPER MISSOURI RIVER REACH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MOUTH OF THE JAMES.]

There are many men who live and die with the undisputed reputation of being good fellows--your friends and mine--who, if put to the test, would fail miserably. Fortunate is that man to whom it is not given to test all of his friends. This is not cynicism; it is only human nature; and I love human nature, being myself possessed of so much of it. I admire it when it stands firmly upon its legs, and I love it when it wabbles. But when it gains power with increasing odds, grows big with obstacles, I wors.h.i.+p it.

"To thrill with the joy of girded men, To go on forever and fail, and go on again-- With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night--"

Thus it should have been. But that night, staring into the face of three of the four, I saw the yellow streak. The Kid was not one of the three.

The first railroad station would hold out no temptation to him. He was a kid, but manhood has little to do with age. It must exist from the first like a tang of iron in the blood. Age does not really create anything--it only develops. Your wonderful and beautiful things often come as paradoxes. I looked for a man and found him in a boy.

Bill talked about home and stared into the twilight. The "floaters" were irritable, quarreling with the fire, the grub, the cooking-utensils, and verbally sending the engine to the devil.

Seeing about eighteen hundred miles of paddle work ahead, knowing that at that season of the year the prevailing winds would be head winds, and having very little faith in the engine under any conditions, I decided to travel day and night, for the water was falling steadily and already the channels were at times hard to find. Charley and Frank grumbled. I told them we would split the grub fairly, a fifth to a man, and that they might travel as slowly as they liked, the skiff being their property. They stayed with us.