Jack Heaton, gold seeker

by A. Frederick Collins

The boys made a fairly comfortable camp and set about building a raft of spruce logs which they lashed together with rawhide thongs. When this was done and they could get across the river they built up a great pile of rocks on either side of it but well back from the shore. Before another moon rolled round they were ready to make a fresh start down the river.

“What about these huskies here,” asked Bill, who always kept his weather-eye open for the welfare of their dogs even though they didn’t have any more use for them.

“We’ll turn them loose and they’ll follow us along the shore all right,” replied Jack, and so that little matter was settled.

They loaded the remaining sacks of gold, their outfit and provisions, of which precious little was left, onto the raft. In the middle they had built up a platform of saplings for Eileen to sit on to the thoughtful end that when the raft struck the rapids and took a notion to dive, like a submarine, the water would not wash over and wet her.

Then Eileen took her seat on the platform, Jack stood on the front end and Bill on the diagonal corner of the rear end and with their long poles they pushed their treasure float off shore. As Jack had said, the huskies followed them and they kept as close to the edge of the river as they could, barking and howling furiously as they ran along.

It took very little effort on the part of the boys to steer the raft and none at all to keep it moving as the current was augmented all along by rivulets and streams from the melting snows. Where the river was wide and the water shallow the raft sailed gently along but where the channel was narrow the boys had to do some tall maneuvering to keep it from getting swamped.

The rapids, of which there were many, were their despair. When the ungainly craft struck these eddying currents it pitched and rolled about like a piece of cork and the little crew had to hang on to it for dear life. In this exciting fashion they covered the rest of the distance down the Big Black River. Just before they came to the mouth where it empties into the Porcupine River the bed made a sharp descent and the water rushed down it in a mighty torrent.

There was a bend in the river ahead of them and this too they successfully navigated, but a rock, that projected out of the water, and which was directly in their course, proved their undoing. Jack managed to get his pole on it and brought all of his strength to bear to keep the raft clear of it, but the weight and the momentum were too great and a corner struck it with such force that Eileen and the boys were thrown bodily into the water.

It was well for them that they were good swimmers and after a struggle with the swift current all of them landed on the shore like bags of wet rags. Then the huskies covered with mud and rending the air with their vocal organs swarmed round them.

Never in all his life had Jack felt more like crying. He could stand any kind of bodily pain but with all of their gold gone he suffered exquisite mental torture. Many a prospector in the early days had killed himself for less bad luck. Bill seemed to be not all there for he acted queerly and talked about the little “boidies” that were singing in the trees, the “bloomin’” flowers that bloomed in the spring, and other like idiotic fancies that hadn’t anything to do with the case, tra, la.