John timed some of the boats through, and found that it took about eight minutes from the head of the eddy to the bottom of the chute. This Rob could hardly believe, as he said that when he went through it seemed not more than two minutes at the outside.
John and Jesse grew very grumpy over the prestige Rob had gained by his journey through the rapids, and besought Uncle Dick to allow them also to make the passage. Late in the third day, when most of the boats were through, they renewed their importunities, and he finally replied:
“Well, young men, I’ve about concluded to let you go through with the last boat. François says that he has been watching you all, and believes that you would not get ‘some scares.’ He says he will take you through in your own boat, which will be the last one of the brigade. The river has come up three or four inches since we struck in, and he says we can run through without unshipping much, if any, of our cargo, which doesn’t amount to very much. Rob has made the trip, and I figure now that we are all in the same boat together. Sometimes it is necessary to be either a man or a mouse. I want to see you grow up men. Well, are you ready now?”
All the boys gladly said that they were, Rob insisting on accompanying the boat once more, as indeed was necessary, since there would be no transport after that.
They took ship at the head of the island, and were tooled across the shallow water to the head of the rapids on the farther shore. Here the men all disembarked and sat silently along the edge of the bluff, taking one of the pipe-smokes which make so regular a part of the voyageur’s day’s employment. They seemed to get some sort of comfort out of their pipes, and almost invariably when undertaking any dangerous enterprise a quiet smoke was a part of the preparation.
François talked to them, meantime, seeing that they were eager to learn about the customs of this strange and wild country into which they now were going. He told them, motioning to the steep hillside on the right of the channel, that in the old times he used to pack stuff across the mile-and-a-half portage there for fifty cents a hundred pounds. It was hard work, and yet he made it pay. When they began to portage on the island, and not along the mountain-side, he had made as much as fifty dollars a day, for he got five dollars for taking a boat through the rapids, or thirty dollars for running it down to Fort McPherson; so that a season’s work would bring him, in very good years, over a thousand dollars, if he worked.
“But yong man, she spend the mon’,” said he, smiling.
John set down in his book the facts and figures, the date of 1871, which was the time when old Cap. Shott first ran a boat through the Grand Rapids. Since that time a few other pilots had come on who proved able to handle scows in white water. But old Cap. Shott and his long-time friend, Louis La Vallee, were now both of them old—“h’almost h’eighty year, she is, each of him,” said François.
“Well, now,” he added at length, “we will ron h’on the rapide.”
He rose and motioned to his men, who once more took their places at the oars, as they had in the boat which carried Rob through. Again the bowman squatted on his short fore deck. François, the steersman, stood on his plank walk at the handle of the great steering-oar. Gently they pushed out from shore, the last boat of the brigade.