gear, surrendered to the whirlpool and helped the boat to take the
circle.
Three times it went around, each time so close to the rocks on which
Kit and Shorty stood, that either could have leaped on board. The
steersman, a man with a reddish beard of recent growth, waved his
hand to them. The only way out of the whirlpool was by the Mane,
and on the round the boat entered the Mane obliquely at its upper
end. Possibly out of fear of the draw of the whirlpool, the
steersman did not attempt to straighten out quickly enough. When he
did, it was too late. Alternately in the air and buried, the boat
angled the Mane and sucked into and down through the stiff wall of
the corkscrew on the opposite side of the river. A hundred feet
below, boxes and bales began to float up. Then appeared the bottom
of the boat and the scattered heads of six men. Two managed to make
the bank in the eddy below. The others were drawn under, and the
general flotsam was lost to view, borne on by the swift current
around the bend.
There was a long minute of silence. Shorty was the first to speak.
“Come on,” he said. “We might as well tackle it. My feet’ll get
cold if I stay here any longer.”
“We’ll smoke some,” Kit grinned at him.
“And you’ll sure earn your name,” was the rejoinder. Shorty turned
SMOKE BELLEW
31
to their employers. “Comin’?” he queried.
Perhaps the roar of the water prevented them from hearing the
invitation.
Shorty and Kit tramped back through a foot of snow to the head of
the rapids and cast off the boat. Kit was divided between two
impressions: one, of the caliber of his comrade, which served as a
spur to him; the other, likewise a spur, was the knowledge that old
Isaac Bellew, and all the other Bellews, had done things like this
in their westward march of empire. What they had done, he could do.
It was the meat, the strong meat, and he knew, as never before, that
it required strong men to eat such meat.
“You’ve sure got to keep the top of the ridge,” Shorty shouted at
him, the plug tobacco lifting to his mouth, as the boat quickened in
the quickening current and took the head of the rapids.
Kit nodded, swayed his strength and weight tentatively on the
steering oar, and headed the boat for the plunge.
Several minutes later, half-swamped and lying against the bank in
the eddy below the White Horse, Shorty spat out a mouthful of
tobacco juice and shook Kit’s hand.
“Meat! Meat!” Shorty chanted. “We eat it raw! We eat it alive!”
At the top of the bank they met Breck. His wife stood at a little
distance. Kit shook his hand.
“I’m afraid your boat can’t make it,” he said. “It is smaller than
ours and a bit cranky.”
The man pulled out a row of bills.
“I’ll give you each a hundred if you run it through.”
Kit looked out and up the tossing Mane of the White Horse. A long,
gray twilight was falling, it was turning colder, and the landscape
seemed taking on a savage bleakness.
“It ain’t that,” Shorty was saying. “We don’t want your money.
Wouldn’t touch it nohow. But my pardner is the real meat with
boats, and when he says yourn ain’t safe I reckon he knows what he’s
talkin’ about.”
Kit nodded affirmation, and chanced to glance at Mrs Breck. Her
eyes were fixed upon him, and he knew that if ever he had seen
prayer in a woman’s eyes he was seeing it then. Shorty followed his
gaze and saw what he saw. They looked at each other in confusion
and did not speak. Moved by the common impulse, they nodded to each
other and turned to the trail that led to the head of the rapids.
They had not gone a hundred yards when they met Stine and Sprague
coming down.
“Where are you going?” the latter demanded.
SMOKE BELLEW
32
“To fetch that other boat through,” Shorty answered.
“No you’re not. It’s getting dark. You two are going to pitch
camp.”
So huge was Kit’s disgust that he forebore to speak.
“He’s got his wife with him,” Shorty said.
“That’s his lookout,” Stine contributed.
“And Smoke’s and mine,” was Shorty’s retort.
“I forbid you,” Sprague said harshly. “Smoke, if you go another
step I’ll discharge you.”
“And you, too, Shorty,” Stine added.
“And a hell of a pickle you’ll be in with us fired,” Shorty replied.
“How’ll you get your blamed boat to Dawson? Who’ll serve you coffee
in your blankets and manicure your finger-nails? Come on, Smoke.
They don’t dast fire us. Besides, we’ve got agreements. It they
fire us they’ve got to divvy up grub to last us through the winter.”
Barely had they shoved Breck’s boat out from the bank and caught the
first rough water, when the waves began to lap aboard. They were
small waves, but it was an earnest of what was to come. Shorty cast
back a quizzical glance as he gnawed at his inevitable plug, and Kit
felt a strange rush of warmth at his heart for this man who couldn’t
swim and who couldn’t back out.
The rapids grew stiffer, and the spray began to fly. In the
gathering darkness, Kit glimpsed the Mane and the crooked fling of
the current into it. He worked into this crooked current, and felt
a glow of satisfaction as the boat hit the head of the Mane squarely
in the middle. After that, in the smother, leaping and burying and
swamping, he had no clear impression of anything save that he swung
his weight on the steering oar and wished his uncle were there to
see. They emerged, breathless, wet through, and filled with water
almost to the gunwale. Lighter pieces of baggage and outfit were
floating inside the boat. A few careful strokes on Shorty’s part
worked the boat into the draw of the eddy, and the eddy did the rest
till the boat softly touched against the bank. Looking down from
above was Mrs Breck. Her prayer had been answered, and the tears
were streaming down her cheeks.
“You boys have simply got to take the money,” Breck called down to
them.
Shorty stood up, slipped, and sat down in the water, while the boat
dipped one gunwale under and righted again.
“Damn the money,” said Shorty. “Fetch out that whiskey. Now that
it’s over I’m getting cold feet, an’ I’m sure likely to have a
chill.”
SMOKE BELLEW
33
V.
In the morning, as usual, they were among the last of the boats to
start. Breck, despite his boating inefficiency, and with only his
wife and nephew for crew, had broken camp, loaded his boat, and
pulled out at the first streak of day. But there was no hurry in
Stine and Sprague, who seemed incapable of realizing that the
freeze-up might come at any time. They malingered, got in the way,
delayed, and doubted the work of Kit and Shorty.
“I’m sure losing my respect for God, seein’ as he must a-made them
two mistakes in human form,” was the latter’s blasphemous way of
expressing his disgust.
“Well, you’re the real goods at any rate,” Kit grinned back at him.
“It makes me respect God the more just to look at you.”
“He was sure goin’ some, eh?” was Shorty’s fashion of overcoming the
embarrassment of the compliment.
The trail by water crossed Lake Le Barge. Here was no fast current,
but a tideless stretch of forty miles which must be rowed unless a
fair wind blew. But the time for fair wind was past, and an icy
gale blew in their teeth out of the north. This made a rough sea,
against which it was almost impossible to pull the boat. Added to
their troubles was driving snow; also, the freezing of the water on
their oar-blades kept one man occupied in chopping it off with a
hatchet. Compelled to take their turn at the oars, Sprague and
Stine patently loafed. Kit had learned how to throw his weight on
an oar, but he noted that his employers made a seeming of throwing
their weights and that they dipped their oars at a cheating angle.
At the end of three hours, Sprague pulled his oar in and said they
would run back into the mouth of the river for shelter. Stine
seconded him, and the several hard-won miles were lost. A second
day, and a third, the same fruitless attempt was made. In the river
mouth, the continually arriving boats from White Horse made a
flotilla of over two hundred. Each day forty or fifty arrived, and
only two or three won to the north-west short of the lake and did
not come back. Ice was now forming in the eddies, and connecting