The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 28

"This heap bad," said Harry as they started out, "but I in plenty worse.

Keep eyes open much."

"Right you are, Harry," sung out Roger cheerily, and a moment later the canoe shot into the mouth of the canyon, the other members of the party watching them with some anxiety, as, aside from the question of danger, the loss of one of the boats would mean a great deal of extra work on the trip. As the canoe entered the canyon Roger could feel the whole frame of his companion quiver with the intensity of attention, and he heeded every move of the canoe so closely that he felt as though he knew before every movement of the stern paddle just in what direction it would be, and of what weight.

The boy had learned well the lesson of following orders, and his confidence in his companion was so absolute that he was untroubled in mind, which went far to make him alert and able. Suddenly, the boat gave a little jump and the current leaped to double its speed, and for two hundred feet they rushed down a smooth plane of dark water with a seethe of foam awaiting them at the bottom. Just as they reached it, Harry shouted:

"Now!" and bore outward with all his strength.

"Sure!" came Roger's ready answer, as he followed the action almost simultaneously, but his confidence received a sudden check when they plunged into blinding foam which drove across the boat so that the Indian could hardly discern the lad kneeling in the bow. Angry little cross-waves leaped at them, naked scarps of rocks thrust bared fangs at them, but threading, this way and that, a channel of almost unbelievable intricacy and appalling narrowness, the little boat went through.

At the base of the second of these, in a moment of comparatively still water, the Indian called:

"Plenty heap good paddle," he said, "but too much beefsteak. More easy stroke." He broke off suddenly, "Ah!"

The warning was needed, for the vicious spite of this rapid began at its very mouth, and once the boy heard Harry grunt as he put his whole strength into a double stroke which, Roger could have sworn, made the frame of the canoe bend and wriggle like a snake. There followed then a greater rapidity of current again, and the walls of the gorge closed in until it seemed to the boy that if they got any nearer the boat would be shooting through a tunnel, and the prospect of a subterranean tunnel was not pleasant.

Just at the narrowest part, when it was difficult sometimes to avoid the paddles striking the rock on the side, the torrent boiling through and both men backing water, the canyon took a sharp turn to the right. Harry threw her head round, but not far enough, for there, not fifteen feet away from the angle of the bend, a black rock rose sheer from the water, with a spur sticking out, exactly like the spur of a fighting c.o.c.k. The boat could not clear, and though Roger got the bow by, the current crushed the side of the canoe against the rock, and with a cry the Indian leaped for the spur.

"Jump!" he yelled to Roger.

But Harry's leap from the stern of the boat, just as she crashed, threw the canoe off sufficiently to prevent its entire demolition, so, though the frail craft grazed the sharp edge of the rock with the speed of an express train, crus.h.i.+ng in its upper part, it was still seaworthy. Roger noted that the Indian had not reached a footing on the spur, but was hanging by a hand-hold to a ledge which it would be almost impossible to climb.

The thought pa.s.sed through Roger's mind that Rivers would blame himself for having let him go, in the event of anything happening, but there was little time for speculation. From the bow he could see the dangers that were before him, but not being in the stern, the canoe was hard to paddle, and almost as in a desperate nightmare, he paddled and swerved and dodged rocks that sprang at him out of the water as though they were alive. Though his heart was in his mouth, and he expected every moment to be his last, the training of the past year stood him in good stead, and his eye never wavered nor did his hand become unsteady until, five minutes later, he reached in safety the gravel flat below the last rapid.

There he held the boat to regain his breath, and found time to wonder whether Harry had managed to climb on the spur, and if he had, how the party would be able to release him. But scarcely had this question formulated itself in his mind than, close by the canoe, two hands thrust themselves out of the water, followed by a shock of coa.r.s.e black hair, and with one side of his head bleeding profusely from a scalp wound he had received on his way down the rapid, the Indian made his way to the boat. Roger helped him in over the stern and they paddled to the sh.o.r.e.

"Heap fine," he commented, "thought you gone sure, that time."

"You were politer than I was," replied the boy, laughing with a catch in his voice, "I was too busy even to think of you till I got down here."

He went on laughing, but harshly and with a curious clang in the tones.

The Indian looked up sharply.

"Stop," he said, "you no laugh."

Roger, brought to a pause by the abrupt command, found he was choking over his laugh, and that his nerves were badly shaken. He felt a wild desire to laugh and cry alternately, but he gulped down a few times, straightened up and looked Harry squarely in the eye.

"I'm all right now," he said.

The Indian looked back over the rapid down which they had just come, and shook his head.

"Well, we got through any way," commented Roger.

"Yes," answered Harry slowly, "but we heap near not get through."

"Oh, well," replied the boy with all the recklessness of youth concerning a danger which is past and over, "a miss is as good as a mile, any way."

"So," replied the Indian, "but when it is my scalp," pointing to his head, "I like mile, every time."

This drawing attention to the cut on Harry's head, Roger looked at it, and found that although it had bled freely, it was but a superficial cut, and would afford no trouble, at least until they got back to the camp, where the chief would see that it was attended to. But they were a long way from the camp, as the two speedily found when they started on their homeward journey.

The trip down the rapids, Roger found, had taken a little less than fifty minutes, and he thought that perhaps it might take a couple of hours for them to make their way home. But even Harry underestimated the distance that they had come, and the way back, climbing over fallen trees, scrambling through thickets, stopped by underbrush, scratched by thorns, and caught in brambles, was a fearful task, and it was eleven o'clock at night before they got into camp, having taken fourteen hours to come back the twelve miles they had done in the canoe in fifty minutes.

They found the camp waiting for them, and Rivers growing very anxious at their non-return. He realized, of course, that the rapid might have proved far longer than had been expected, and that the two would have some difficulty getting back, but there was a fear of possibly worse consequences. The cut on Harry's head revealed that everything had not gone well, and the Indian, nothing loath, told in his short and jerky way the story of the perilous pa.s.sage, giving the boy due credit for bringing the boat through the last few hundred yards of the rapids, and averring that he was all that could be desired as a comrade.

Roger's exhaustion from the long tramp back to camp was such that the chief of the party gave orders that he was not to be awakened early, and it was eight o'clock before the boy rolled over and sleepily opened his eyes to find the camp work well advanced and breakfast over. He jumped up hurriedly, looking for the various members of the party, but found only Harry and the cook there.

"Why, where's the crowd?" he asked.

"Waal, son," said the cook, "Mr. Rivers he reckoned that a good sleep wouldn't do any harm, seeing the job you tackled yesterday, and you won't have much to do to-day. The rest of them have started packing the grub over the carry to where you left the first boat. They're loaded down good and proper, for I don't believe one of 'em has less than eighty pounds, and Bulson's got one hundred and ten, all right."

"There's a lot of stuff here yet," commented Roger, looking around, "and that's no small walk. How many trips do you suppose it will take to get it all down there?"

"Just one trip more, to-morrow. You see on to-morrow's trip Harry and you and I will have a load, and three extra men can tote a lot."

"But why were we let out of it to-day?" queried the boy.

"We take other boat down," put in the Indian, who had been listening, "this time we do it heap easy. No get knocked on the head."

"I hope not, for your sake," said Roger, who, though no coward, had been secretly hoping that some one else would look after the other boat. "But it's quite a trick to have to tackle again."

"No," replied Harry, with a quick negative shake of the head. "Heap easy now. I draw map every rock, know when stop canoe."

"Yes," said the cook thoughtfully, "it isn't much of a job to run a rapid when you know what's ahead of you; the trouble is generally that some fool rock shows up when you least expect it."

"That's true," said the boy thoughtfully, "even the rock we nearly went to smash on,--the one you jumped, you know,--we could have dodged that if we had known that it was there and had hugged the right-hand sh.o.r.e."

"No strike rock this time. You no want try jump?"

"Not on your life, Harry," laughed Roger. "I'm not aching for excitement as much as that. Going through that rapid again will give me enough to think of for one day, at least."

In the meanwhile, the boat having been got ready, the two shoved out into the stream and headed for the rapid. As the other men had suggested, the pa.s.sage lost some of its terrors when it was known what lay beyond, but Roger found that his companion possessed a memory for every little turn of the river which was to him incredible. He felt that he would have to go through it a dozen times before he could begin to act as a pilot through, but Harry had the whole stretch of boiling water as clearly in his mind as though an immense chart were stretched out before him.

The second rapid with its smother of foam, moreover, looked almost as bad to the boy on the second trial as it had on the first, and his heart beat more rapidly as the boat shot into the narrow gorge, in the midst of which, a little lower down, the sharp and jagged spur lay awaiting the unready traveler. But the Indian was on the alert, and just at the right moment he drove the canoe over beside the bank, so close that Roger feared a slight eddy might crush in the eggsh.e.l.l sides of the canoe. But even with every inch gained at the turn, the old black spur suddenly appeared around the bend, grim and perilous athwart their path.

Then Harry put his muscle into the paddle, Roger following suit, and they flew across the river with such speed that the current driving them on the rock had little chance to catch the boat, and they shaved the danger with about two feet to spare. The rapid beyond, which Roger had run himself, was none too easy, and as the boy noted its difficulty, he felt a thrill of pride that he had managed to take the first boat through that alone.

"Heap bad rapid," said Harry, when the second boat had been drawn up beside the first, and he had examined both the canoes carefully to see how much damage they had sustained on the trip.

"Have you ever run any that were worse than this?" queried Roger.

"No. Plenty longer, rougher, but rock in middle much bad."

Questioning his companion Roger heard many stories of difficult and dangerous canoe trips, told with the unimpa.s.sioned utterance of the Indian, and in his broken English, and he was able to see that the canyon through which they had pa.s.sed was almost as bad as any of them.

They did not have to wait long for the arrival of the party from the upper camp, for the latter had cut the trail the preceding day, while Harry and Roger were taking the first boat down and returning, so that when they started the next morning before breakfast, it was fairly good going. Shortly before noon, the canoeists, waiting beside the boats, heard shouts to which they responded, and a few minutes later the packing party came cras.h.i.+ng through the trees to the riverside.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SHORT BUT DANGEROUS RAPID.

In tracking canoes to save time of portage, great skill is needed in these swirling currents.