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THE steamer Emily C. Just crept down the yellow flood of the Flambeau River to Kittiko, where Ralph and Woodbury and their Indian guides would at last take to canoes.

As to the tonnage of the Emily C. Just—it hasn’t any tonnage in particular; it has only pounds and ounces. Though it is sixty feet long, with no less than seven staterooms (including one cabin de luxe fitted with running water and a special china cuspidor, for such infrequent dignitaries as the Fishing Inspector), yet the superstructure is of inch pine, and the partitions of cardboard.

It has none of the regular habits of a liner. It runs each way twice a week—except when it is a day or two late, or when Captain Venner stops to look over the potato crop on his claim en route, or finds a poker game and gives up that particular trip entirely. It is a stern wheeler, and paddles contentedly through three feet of water or turns surprisingly from steamer into canoe and shoots a rapids, curveting among the rocks.

Once or twice it has sunk, and after such misfortunes the mud has been scraped off and the boat been repainted a pleasing robin’s-egg blue with an orange smokestack.

There is an idle charm to river steamers. They are not forlorn in an alien expanse of waters. They run so close to one shore or the other as to share in its life, yet they are free from the cinders and stink of a train skirting tenements. The passengers leaning on the rail of the Emily C. Just and gravely spitting into the Flambeau can consider the family affairs of every chicken scratching in every runty clearing; and in luxurious scorn of hurry and ambition they can learnedly argue as to whether or no that ruined reed-mound of a muskrat nest was occupied last winter.

The Emily C. Just stops in at ports consisting of two log cabins and a wigwam; the captain, lordly in his pilot-house, is hailed by a half-breed trapper, with a face like bacon-rind, as “Cap,” or “Billy,” and that is all very pleasant and domestic. Sometimes the steamer makes a port that is not so populous, that is only a woodpile on the bank, and then the deck-gang, all three of them, pass the cordwood from hand to hand into the hold, which is a cross between a Vermont woodshed and an antiquated machine-shop.

The passengers may go ashore at any stop, with no formalities about passports, customs inspectors, jinrikisha drivers, postcard vendors, bars, or the rules of the purser. If they do not return in time, the steamer whistles for them like a hen clucking to its young, then waits contentedly, while the captain plays cribbage with the chief (and only) engineer, or shows the missionary’s children how to make birch-bark canoes out of paper.

Ralph was relaxed in his raw-nerved and egotistic resistance to the unknown land. He speculated on ruined cabins of trappers along the shore, on clearings wrung from the forest with such bitter grubbing of stumps, such painful plowing of root-knotted fields, but abandoned again, and tragic against the forbidding and dusky spruce. He speculated on mink holes and on mother black ducks, fearfully trying to save their skittering brood by leading them right beside the leisurely and chugging course of the steamer, in the typically maternal impression that they were racing and beating this monster of modernity, and that but for their adult wisdom and clucking, the children would instantly have been destroyed.

He went ashore (escaping Woodbury’s company and regretting such disloyalty and most vigorously keeping it up), and he discovered a real Cree Indian encampment—birch-bark wigwams, young wives with babies swinging on their backs, old women smoking pipes while they cured moose-meat and whitefish on frames over a sluggish fire, Indian men magnificently doing nothing, thinking nothing, and wanting nothing. He ambled into a forest of jack-pine and poplar and occasional clumps of birch silver as Diana; he was driven out by an ambush of mosquitoes; he went aboard, and cheerfully he sat on the deck floor of the Emily C. Just, his back against the wall, smoking a pipe.... Wes Woodbury had explained to him that nothing was more necessary in the art of being virile than giving up cigarettes for a brave jimmy pipe.

He found in the steamer the same toy quality which had betrayed him into gayety in their tent. The dining-salon was a touchingly absurd closet in which a glazed-faced Chinaman served, he asserted, hamneggscoffpie. The captain welcomed them in the tiny pilot-house, and showed them how to recognize the snags and ghostly sunken logs in the foam-streaked current ahead. And all day long the stern-paddles churned the yellow paint of the water into leaping foam through which, above that mossy mill-wheel, a rainbow burned.

If he could have gone on for a week, Ralph would have grown into serenity, have heard Woodbury’s incessant heartiness through a veil of contentment. But next morning they landed at Kittiko—two log stores, two log boarding-houses, and the fish warehouse—for their embarkation in canoes.

Woodbury, in his zeal of being efficient and hardy, immediately blew up like a toy balloon.

Though they had two large freight-canoes, nineteen feet long, it seemed impossible that they should ever be able to stow away all this pile of tents, bedding, duffle-bags, boxes of food, sacks of flour and sides of bacon, sails and oars and gasoline-tins and frying-pans, which towered on the log wharf. And Woodbury’s outboard motor had to be fitted to the forward canoe—Ralph’s canoe he would tow, when smooth and open water permitted them to run on gasoline. A scratch or two had to be smeared with canoe-glue and paint. Saplings had to be cut as masts.

In all these tasks Ralph was sensationally useless.

Woodbury had at its highest the schoolmaster’s art of making sport compulsory and laborious and pious and dreadful. He was a four-minute man, a suburban-development sales-manager, a lady chairman.

He rushed at the guides and agonized, “Now hurry up and get the stuff in—get it in—get it all aboard.” He tried to fit the outboard motor to the rack on his canoe, and banged his finger-nails, and swore, and glared at Ralph. He bellowed that the sapling masts were too large for the holes in the thwarts, and when they proved to be exactly right, he scowled, and announced, “Well, they don’t look strong enough.”

He shouted at Ralph: “Well, try to do something, anyway! Don’t sit there admiring yourself!”

When Ralph ventured to lower a box of bacon into his canoe (riskily tilting on the gunwale, holding the rough edge of the wharf with one hand), Woodbury exploded, “Good Lord, don’t put that box for’ard—gotta have the weight in the center.”

Ralph felt meek, horribly useless, in everybody’s way. He was tremulously polite to Louey, the youngest and most bored guide, he was filial to Charley, to Woodbury he was absolutely reverent; and when the great white chief condescended to hear his tribute, “You certainly do know this game, Wes,” he was grateful.

For all of Woodbury’s sales-manager efficiency, the work did somehow get itself done.

The cargo seemed to condense as it slid into the canoes. There had apparently been twice as much load as they could carry, yet by magic the canoes seemed only half full.

Amidships of each canoe was a nest for one of the white men, his bed-roll as seat and his toys at hand—fishing-tackle, gun, even a paddle (though Woodbury had to sit in the stern when the motor was running). The Indians didn’t at all mind the tenderfeet pretending to help propel the unwieldy canoes now and then, providing they were careful not to spatter water from their paddles. Indeed they scarcely laughed at their efforts, after the first few times.

Everything was complete except Woodbury’s especial charge, the outboard motor, and that was clamped in place, all pretty and shining, all ready save for one thing—it would not start.

It would not give one sputter. Not after half an hour of profane jerking at the starting-cord could Woodbury get it to take hold.

Ralph looked wistfully from the log wharf down on the raging Woodbury. He was alone. The population of Kittiko, five whites and nine Indians, had come to gape at the expedition, but in his present disillusionment about life Woodbury was not so cordial as usual, and they had drifted away. The Indian guides, their loading done, squatted on a pile of sawdust ashore and let the sun shine.

Whether they started this week or next year was the same to them, providing the bacon and cigarettes lasted.

Ralph knew as much about motors as the average man who has driven a car for only ten or twelve years. He knew a steering-wheel from a hand-brake, and he could pour water into a radiator. The outboard motor was a heathen mystery to him—a round something with a finned single cylinder, a long handle, and nothing else identifiable.

When Woodbury had for a moment given up, when he stood looking bitterly at the motor, as though he was wondering how he could best hurt its feelings, Ralph ventured:

“Do you suppose the feed-pipe might be plugged up?”

Woodbury, swaying in the canoe, raised his hands to heaven in the protest of a dying martyr, then patiently gave voice:

“It must take a great brain to think up suggestions like that! You’re certainly helping me a lot! Of course I’ve only cleaned out the feed-pipe a couple of times now, while you’ve been looking on!”

Ralph retired to the end of the wharf; he considered two mud-hens and a clump of weeds, and longed for the Yale Club.

The Hudson’s Bay factor ambled down the wharf. Woodbury could be seen stiffening, down in his canoe, ready to leap the five feet up on the wharf and choke the fellow at his very first suggestion. The factor, who looked like a preacher and who had a magnificent flow of divine language, squinted one eye, heaved with amusement, grunted “Vent choked in tank,” and humped away with a scorn which reduced to pitiful greenness not only Ralph but the great E. Wesson Woodbury.

Ralph saw Woodbury swell like a pussy-cat’s tail while he sought for proper language. But also he saw him examine and poke at the vent in the gasoline tank; seize the starting-cord and jerk it.

Instantly the motor spatted and ran clear, with the sound of a very tiny airplane.

Woodbury stood up in the canoe, his fists clenched, glaring at Ralph, daring him to say one word. Ralph looked as blank as possible. Then Woodbury glowered the other way, at the Indians on shore. They had gone to sleep. The cruelly used leader felt injured. He brooded for a time over all his unprecedented wrongs, then he roared, “Well, are you fellows going on a canoe trip or not?”

So the golden Argosy embarked; so the fabulous expedition started for the unknown heart of the North.

One Indian squaw came to her wigwam door and stared after them. Otherwise, the world seemed ignorant that Ralph Prescott and E. Wesson Woodbury were making history.

Then for two weeks all life was a routine of struggling on and stopping to catch muskalonge.

Sometimes they poled or paddled through shallow snaky creeks; sometimes Woodbury towed them, the motor’s burr as hypnotizing as a humming bee. They came into Lake Warwick, a vast plate of water, island-spattered and stretching to a shore of black cliffs fantastic with orange lichens. On calm days the motor-driven canoe clove the polished water, but with a following wind they sailed.

There were only three or four inches of freeboard to the canoe, and often they took water. Ralph was tremulous as he considered their helplessness in sailing. They were miles from shore, in a shell which would go down instantly if they struck a submerged rock, and he could not have swum a quarter-mile.

He fought himself, he scorned his cowardice, he reproved himself by the spectacle of Woodbury relaxed in enjoyment of the sail, but he could not keep from speculating as to what chance he would have of drifting ashore if they sank.

Yet it was beautiful: waves glittering, triangular sails like curving wings of a gull till at evening the low sun turned the sails to gold, with that orange glory burning through them.

He hated the guides during sailing hours.

He had heard always of the “grim silent Indians.” The Woods Crees, at least, exhibited a silence almost equal to their hatred of whisky. They kept quiet enough during the labor of paddling, and the motor drowned their clack when it was blessedly working, but in the stillness of sailing, when Ralph most longed to forget his detestable self-consciousness and timidity, to be absorbed in beauty, then his bow-man and stern-man babbled like washerwomen, giggled like little girls, shouted witticisms across to the Indians in the other canoe.

Some of their exasperatingly unending jabber was smutty stories, he concluded from their neighing; some of it, from their glances, certainly was poignant comment on Woodbury and himself. As his own Indians spoke only Cree, he could neither understand them nor tell them to shut up. And he wanted to be a “good sport,” to keep from complaining. He listened, and suffered—and grew hourly more irritated.

They crossed from Lake Warwick to the wide Mantrap River, and headed toward Lac Qui Rêve, on which was a trading center where they could renew their food-supply and gasoline—a settlement called Mantrap Landing, with a Revillon Frères store, a Hudson’s Bay post, and a free trader by the name of Joe Easter; a place with a vast population of perhaps a dozen whites and, in summer, when they loafed after the winter’s trapping, fifty or sixty Indians.

Ralph felt hardened. He could sleep on the ground as in a four-poster, he could relish bacon, he was only a little apprehensive about sailing and rapids. He had watched his Indians zigzag their way down half a dozen smoking rapids now, and had come to see with indifference the rocks rushing up at them.

But he could no longer endure E. Wesson Woodbury.

Woodbury had developed from fussiness to nagging. He criticized Ralph’s kit, his fly-casting, the amount he carried on portages, the way he strapped his bed-roll, his shrinking before a swim in icy water, as though Ralph were his office boy and given to losing messages. Whatever his mood, Woodbury was unrestrained about it. His jovialities were as hard to endure as his bad tempers, and there were many of them to endure in the forced intimacy of tent and meals, and fishing from the same canoe. When he had a feeling for smoking-room stories, he shouted them and emphasized all the dirty words. But worst of all was his early-morning jokiness.

Before Ralph had even washed his sandy eyes, or swallowed a drop of coffee to strengthen himself against pleasantries, Woodbury would be bounding with dreadful good spirits.

He would poke Ralph awake and yelp: “Going to pound your ear all day? Well, there’s one thing you can do decently—you can sleep. Ha, ha, ha!” (But the sound wasn’t really a ha; it was a more gurgling and complacent noise, and more enraging.)

As they went down to the water’s edge, frowsy in rumpled shirts, to wash their faces, Woodbury would playfully splash a bit, and whoop, “All you need is a little water on you to look like a drowned rat, dearie. Didums got bad temper when ums wakes up?”

Of the matter of the odd slice of bacon when they boiled the kettle at noon, “Oh, don’t mind me, Ralphie—just eat all the chow. I can live on air!”

And when Ralph spoke of anything more profound than bonds, the stocking business, golf, or motors, Woodbury croaked, “Great little talker, ain’t you! You’d make a fine college professor. Let’s have a lecture now on evolution!”

He was full of bright sayings and winning ways.

Ralph was not ridiculously meek. He snapped back at Woodbury sometimes, but his effort was to endure everything from cold to wittiness. And here, so wholly submerged in a life new to him, he had almost ceased to be the self-reliant Prescott who would never have tolerated rudeness in a courtroom. In the arts of fishing and the canoe, in the strangeness of camp and portage, among the silent lakes and the noisy Indians, he could not predominate. These alien surroundings pointed by implication more strongly than Woodbury by derision his complete feebleness, and pointed it so strongly that he could not imagine any environment in which Ralph Prescott might perhaps be respected.

He had, for a time, no soul of his own. He became a serf to Crees and to Woodbury, with little thought, small feeling, and only a numb sense of his own stupidity—an insignificant figure crawling over the giant lakes, amid the engulfing gloom of forests.

“But how long can I stand being disciplined like this?” he wondered, when for a moment the breeze cleared away his torpor.