Uncle Dick pointed to the jutting end of the shore which hid the bend of the river from view above them. “You know that river, Leo?” said he.
Leo spread out his hands wide, with a gesture of respect.
“Me know ’um,” said he. “Plenty bad river. Me run ’um, and my Cousin George. And Walt Steffens—he live at Golden, and Jack Bogardus, his partner, and Joe McLimanee, and old man Allison—no one else know this river—no one else ron ’um. No man go up Columby beyond here—come down, yes, maybe-so.”
“Last year,” said Uncle Dick, “when I came in from the Beaver Mouth I saw a broken boat not far below Timbasket Lake. Whose was it?”
“My boat,” grinned Leo. And George also laughed. “We bust up boat on rock, lose flour, tea, everything. We swim out, and walk trail down to here, swim Wood River, and go up Canoe River, fifty mile. Two day we’ll not got anything to eat.”
“Well, I don’t see how they got up these streams at all,” said John.
“Joe McLimanee he come this far from Revelstruck,” said Leo. “Take him twenty-nine day, not on high water.”
“Then there must be bad rapids below here,” said John.
“Yes,” said his uncle, “and, as I went up the Canoe myself from here, I’ve never seen that part of this river, but they say that at the time of the big gold excitements a generation ago, when the miners tried to get out of this country, they took to rafts. The story is that a hundred and sixty-five men of that stampede were drowned in one year on the Death Rapids.”
Leo picked up a stick and began to make a map on the sand, showing the Big Bend of the Columbia and some of its side-streams.