When Steve spoke to him (with an angry kick in the stomach), Job would lift his long-suffering head with an air of meek dejection, and shifting his leg as required plant a huge hoof solidly upon Steve's moccasined foot. If I could paint the look on that great ugly equine head as it turned with leering eye and projecting nether lip, and looked into the anguished face of Steve Chance, I should be able to teach my reader more of cayuses (the meanest creatures on God's earth) than I can ever hope to do. But even with Job to help him, Steve got his load down to the boat at last, and put all aboard except a new pack-saddle, which he had taken off the pack-horse and laid down on the ground beside him.
With lowered head and half-shut eyes Job stood for some minutes patiently waiting, and then, as Steve came over the side to drive him on board with his fellows, the old horse heaved a long, long sigh, and before Steve could reach him lay down slowly and gently upon that pack-saddle. Of course when he got up, the pack-saddle was demolished, and as the last whistle had sounded, there was no time to get another before leaving Westminster.
A new saddle would have to be bought at Douglas, and that would cost money, or made upon the road, and that would mean delay, so Job, with a cynical gleam in his wall-eye, trotted meekly and contentedly on board. He had entered his first protest against extra work.
Five minutes later the steamer Lillooet cast loose from her moorings, the gangway was taken in, and the gallant little stern-wheeler went cleaving her way up through the yellow Frazer, on her forty-mile run to the mouth of Harrison river, steaming past long mud-flats and many a mile of heavy timber.
A day and a half was the time allowed for the journey from New Westminster to Douglas, but Corbett and Chance could hardly believe that they had taken so long when they came to their moorings again at the head of the Harrison Lake.
To them the hours had seemed to fly by, for their eyes and thoughts were busy, intent at one moment upon the bare mud-banks, watching for game or the tracks of the game, the next straining to catch a glimpse of deer feeding at dawn upon the long gray hills—hills which were a pale dun in the light of early morning, but which became full of rich velvety shadows as the day wore on.
Overhead floated the fleecy blue and white sky of spring-time; on the hills patches of wild sunflower mingled with the greenish gray of the sage brush, and here and there, even on the arid barren banks of the Frazer itself, occurred little "pockets" of verdure—hollows with fresh-water springs in them, where the tender green of the young willows, and the abundant white bloom of the choke cherries and olali bushes, made Edens amongst the waste of alkaline mud-banks, Edens tenanted and made musical by all the collected bird-life of that barren land.
The only difficult bit of water for the little steamer was the seven miles of the Harrison river, a rapid, turbulent stream, up which the S.S. Lillooet had to fight every inch of the way; but beyond that lay the lake, a broad blue lake, penned in by steep and heavily-timbered mountains, and beyond the one-house town of Douglas, at which Ned and his fellow-passengers disembarked about noon of the second day out from Westminster.
From Douglas the ordinary route was by river and lake, with a few short portages to Lillooet on the Frazer; and in 1862 there were steamers upon all the lakes (Lillooet, Anderson, and Seton), and canoes (with a certainty of a fair breeze in summer) for such as preferred them.
But Ned and his friends had decided that as they had a pack-train, and would be compelled to pack part of the way in any case, they might just as well harden their hearts and pack the whole distance, more especially since they had ample time to make their journey in, and not too much money to waste upon steamboat fares. So at Douglas Cruickshank bought another pack-saddle for about twice what it would have cost at Westminster (freight was high in the early days), and suggested that as the one house (half store, half hotel) was full to overflowing, they might as well strike out for themselves, and as it was only mid-day make a few miles upon their road before camping for the night.