Читать книгу The Untamed American Spirit: Historical Novels & Western Adventures - Emerson Hough - Страница 70

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Although O’Brien offered them beds in his house, and Carlson bunks on board the Columbia, Rob, John, and Jesse all preferred to sleep out-of-doors as long as they could, and so made their beds on the grass-plot at the top of the bluff, not putting up any tent, as the mosquitoes here were not bad. They were rather tired; and, feeling that their trip was practically over, with little excitement remaining, they slept soundly and did not awake until the sun was shining in their faces.

“Come on, fellows,” said Jesse, kicking off his blankets. “I suppose now we’ll have to get used to washing in a real wash-basin and using a real towel. Somehow I feel more sorry than happy, even if it was rather rough work coming down the river.”

This seemed to be the feeling of both the others, and they were not talkative at the breakfast-table, where O’Brien had supplied them with a fine meal, including abundance of fresh-laid eggs from his own farm-yard.

After breakfast they employed themselves chiefly in making themselves as tidy as they could and in packing their few personal possessions in shape for railway transportation. Most of their outfit, however, they gave away to the men who were to remain behind them. Toward noon the whistle of the steamboat announced that she was ready to take up her down-stream trip; so the young Alaskans were obliged to say good-by to O’Brien, in whose heart they had found a warm place.

“Good luck to ye, byes,” said he, “and don’t be diggin’ all the gold up in Alaska, for ’tis myself’ll be seein’ ye wan of these days — ’tis a foine country entirely, and I’m wishin’ fer a change.”

Leo and George, without any instructions, had turned in to help the boat crew in their work of pushing off. Moise, once aboard the boat, seemed unusually silent and thoughtful for him, until Rob rallied him as to his sorrowful countenance.

“Well,” said Moise, “you boy will all go back on Alaska now, and Moise she’s got to go home on the Peace River. I’ll not been scare’ of the horse or the canoe, but this steamboat and those railroad train she’ll scare Moise plenty. All the time I’m think she’ll ron off the track and bust Moise.”

“You mustn’t feel that way,” said Rob, “for that’s Uncle Dick’s business — finding places for railroads to run. That’s going to be my business too, sometime, as I told you. I think it’s fine — going out here where all those old chaps went a hundred years ago, and to see the country about as they saw it, and to live and travel just about as they did. Men can live in the towns if they like, but in the towns anybody can get on who has money so he can buy things. But in the country where we’ve been, money wouldn’t put you through; you’ve got to know how to do things, and not be afraid.”

“S’pose you boys keep on,” said Moise, “bime-by you make voyageur. Then you come with Moise — she’ll show you something!”

“Well, Moise,” continued Rob, “if we don’t see you many a time again it won’t be our fault, you may be sure.”

“I’m just wondering,” said Jesse, “how Leo and George are going to get back up to the Tête Jaune Cache. They told us they meant to go up the Ashcroft trail and home by way of Fort George and the Fraser River and the ‘choo-choo boat.’ But that seems a long way around. I suppose you’ll come to the hotel with us, down to Revelstoke, won’t you Leo?” he added.

“No like ’um,” said Leo. “My cousin and me, we live in woods till time to take choo-choo that way to Ashcrof’.”

“Well, in that case,” said John, “I think we’d better give you our mosquito-tent; you may need it more than we will, and we can get another up from Seattle at any time.”

“Tent plenty all right,” said Leo. “Thank.” And when John fished it out of the pack-bag and gave it to him he turned it over to George with a few words in his own language.

George carried it away without comment. They were all very much surprised a little later, however, to discover him working away on the tent with his knife, and, to their great disgust, they observed that he was busily engaged in cutting out all the bobbinet windows and in ripping the front of the tent open so that it was precisely like any other tent! John was very indignant at this, but his reproof had little effect on Leo.

“Tent plenty all right now,” said he. “Let plenty air inside! Mosquito no bite ’um Injun.”

When they came to think of it this seemed so funny to them that they rolled on the deck with laughter, but they all agreed to let Leo arrange his own outfit after that.

They passed steadily on down between the lofty banks of the Columbia, here a river several hundred yards in width, and more like a lake than a stream in many of its wider bends. They could see white-topped mountains in many different directions, and, indeed, close to them lay one of the most wonderful mountain regions of the continent, with localities rarely visited at that time save by hunters or travelers as bold as themselves.

Carlson, the good-natured skipper of the Columbia, asked the boys all up to the wheelhouse with him, and even allowed Rob to steer the boat a half-mile in one of the open and easy bends. He told them about his many adventurous trips on the great river and explained to them the allowances it was necessary to make for the current on a bend, the best way of getting off a bar, and the proper method of making a landing.

“You shall make good pilot-man pratty soon,” he said to Rob, approvingly. “Not manny man come down the Colomby. That take pilot-man, too.”

“Well,” said Rob, modestly, “we didn’t really do very much of it ourselves, but I believe we’d have run the rapids wherever the men did if they had allowed us to.”

“Batter not run the rapid so long you can walk, young man,” said Carlson. “The safest kind sailorman ban the man that always stay on shore.” And he laughed heartily at his own wit.

The boat tied up at the head of the Revelstoke Cañon, and here the boys put their scanty luggage in a wagon which had come out to meet her, and started off, carrying their rifles, along the wagon-trail which leads from above the cañon to the town, part of the time on a high trestle.

When they came abreast of the cañon they were well in advance of the men, who also were walking in, and they concluded to go to the brink of the cañon and look down at the water.

REVELSTOKE CAÑON

It was a wild sight enough which they saw from their lofty perch. The great Columbia River, lately so broad and lakelike, was compressed into a narrow strip of raging white water, driven down with such force that they could see very plainly the upflung rib of the river, forced above the level of the edges by the friction on the perpendicular rock walls. From where they peered over the brink they could see vast white surges, and could even distinguish the strange, irregular swells, or boils, which without warning or regularity come up at times from the depths of this erratic river. They quite agreed that it would have been impossible for a boat to go through Revelstoke Cañon alive at the stage of the water as they saw it. Rob tried to make a photograph, which he said he was going to take home to show to his mother.

“You’d better not,” said John. “You’ll get the folks to thinking that this sort of thing isn’t safe!”

The boys stood back from the rim of the cañon after a while and waited for the others to come up with them.

“We think this one looks about as bad as anything we’ve seen, Uncle Dick,” said Rob. “A man might get through once in a while, and they say Sam Boyd and Tom Horn did make it more than once before it got them. It doesn’t look possible to me to run it.”

“The river is a lot worse than the Peace,” said John. “Of course, there’s the Rocky Mountain Cañon, which nobody can get through either way, and there isn’t any portage as bad as that on the whole Columbia Big Bend. But for number of bad rapids this river is a lot worse than the Peace.”

“Yes,” assented the others, “in some ways this is a wilder and more risky trip than the one we had last year. But we’ve had a pretty good time of it just the same, haven’t we?”

“We certainly have,” said Rob; and John and Jesse answered in the same way. “I only wish it wasn’t all over so soon,” added Jesse, disconsolately.

The boys, hardy and lighter of foot even than their companions, raced on ahead over the few remaining miles into Revelstoke town, leaving the bank of the river, which here swung off broad and mild enough once it had emerged from its cañon walls. Before them lay the town of Revelstoke, with its many buildings, its railway trains, and its signs of life and activity.

In town they all found a great budget of mail awaiting them, and concluded to spend the night at Revelstoke in order to do certain necessary writing and telegraphing. They had several letters from their people in Alaska, but none announcing any word from themselves after they had arrived at Edmonton, so that some of the letters bore rather an anxious note.

“What would it cost to send a telegram from here to Seattle, and a cablegram up the coast, and then by wireless up to the fort near Valdez?” inquired Rob. “That ought to get through to-morrow, and just two or three words to let them know we were out safe might make them all feel pretty comfortable. It’s a good thing they don’t know just what we’ve been through the last few days.”

“Well, you go down to the station and see if it can be done,” said Uncle Dick, “and I’ll foot the bill. Get your berths for the next Transcontinental west to Vancouver, and reserve accommodations for Moise and me going east. Leo and George, I’m thinking, will want to wait here for a while; with so much money as he has as grizzly premiums and wages, Leo is not going to leave until he has seen something of the attractions of this city. In fact, I shouldn’t wonder if he got broke here and walked back up to O’Brien’s and took his boat there up the Columbia. They always get back home some way, the beggars, and I’ll warrant you that when we all go to the Tête Jaune Cache by rail, a couple of years from now, we’ll see Leo and George waiting for us at the train as happy as larks!”

“I wonder if my pony’ll be there too?” said John.

“He will, unless something very unusual should happen to him. You’ll find the word of an Indian good; and, although Leo does not talk much, I would depend on him absolutely in any promise that he made. We will have to agree that he has been a good man in everything he agreed to do, a good hunter and a good boatman.”

“We may go in there and have a hunt with him some time after the road comes through,” said Rob. “In fact, all this northern country will seem closer together when the road gets through to Prince Rupert. Why, that’s a lot closer to Valdez than Vancouver is, and we could just step right off the cars there and get off at Leo’s, or even go up to Yellowhead Lake and get another goat.”

“Or find the place where John fell off the raft,” added Jesse, laughing.

“Or go on across to where Uncle Dick may be working, one side or other of the summit. I wish he didn’t have to go back to Edmonton, and could come on home with us now. But we can tell them all about it when we get home.”

“Where’d you like to go the next time, if you had a chance, Rob?” asked John.

“There are a lot of places I’d like to see,” said Rob. “For one thing, I’ve always wanted to go down the Mackenzie and then over the Rat portage to the Yukon, then out to Skagway — that’d be something of a trip. Then I’ve always had a hankering to go up the Saskatchewan and come up over the Howse Pass. And some day we may see the Athabasca Pass and the trail above the Boat Encampment. The railroads have spoiled a lot of the passes south of there, but when you come to read books on exploration you’ll find a lot of things happened, even in the United States, in places where the railroads haven’t gone yet. We’ll have to see some of those countries sometime.”

“How is your map coming on, John?” inquired Uncle Dick, a little later, when once more they had met in their room at the hotel.

“I’ve got this one almost done,” said John.

THE END

FOOTNOTE:

1 At the time of this journey the Kinney ascension of Mount Robson had not yet been made. — The Author.