It lasted several days, and the Shasta stopped only twice at sea: once to cool a crank-pin, and again for a longer while because there was something wrong with her condenser. In due time she crept into a deep, mountain-walled inlet where the little white Sorata lay, and Jimmy gazed in astonishment when he saw the piled-up produce on the strip of shingle beach between still, green water and climbing forest. He was even more astonished when certain bronzed men in battered wide hats and soil-stained jean came off, and conveyed him almost by force to the rude banquet laid out in a little frame hotel. Hitherto they had hauled the few goods they put on the market rather more than eight leagues along an infamous trail which for a part of that distance led over a mountain range.
Jimmy feasted that day, for the banquet was repeated with very little variation three times over, and his last speech was very much to the purpose as well as characteristic of him.
"Boys," he said, "we've steam up, and in view of the freight we're charging you Wellington coal is dear. Besides, even to oblige you, I really couldn't eat anything more."
They paddled him off in state in a big Siwash canoe, and their shouts rang far across the silent pines when the little rusty Shasta crawled away into the evening mist; while long after it had hid her from their sight, Jimmy, standing on his bridge, heard the faint wail of the pipes. There was, as usual, a North Briton among them, and the wild music of another land of rock and pine and inlet six thousand miles away crept up the screw-torn wake in elfin fashion. Jimmy, at least, knew the burden of it: "Will ye no' come back again?"
His blood tingled a little as he listened. They had held out their hands to him, and made him one of them, and it was, he vaguely felt, a thing to be proud of, for there was a certain greatness in these simple, all-enduring men. They grappled with giant forests and rent stubborn rocks, clearing the way for thousands yet to come, with limbs that ached from the axe stroke and hands that bled upon the drill. They feared nothing, and looked for nothing except the prosperity which they would hardly share, but which would surely come; and all down the long Slope their kind are perfecting a manhood that is probably worth more than all the gold, silver, iron and wheat raised beneath the Beaver or the Stars.
It was the same at the next inlet, for that trip was very much of the nature of a triumphal procession, only that as yet the battle was not won; and when at last the Shasta turned her bows southward, she was full to the hatches and deep in the water. As it happened, she met a strong southwester, which piled the long Pacific heave upon the reefs to port in big foam-crested walls, and after the first twelve hours of it there was scarcely a dry inch on board her. She went into it with dipping forecastle that swung up again veiled in cataracts of white and green until her forefoot was clear, and, with complaining engines, made scarcely four knots an hour. There were inlets that offered her shelter, but hour by hour Jimmy, clinging, battered by flying spray, to his reeling bridge, drove her ahead. The time for making speeches, at which he did not shine, had gone, and it was now his business to keep the promise he had made the ranchers, that he would not lose an hour in conveying their produce to the market. That, at least, was a thing he could do, and, though his drenched limbs grew stiff and his eyesight dim, he did it with the dogged thoroughness of his kind, standing high in the stinging drift as he drove her, swept and streaming, at the tumbling seas. He, too, was one of the enduring toilers, and, like the invincible men with the axes who had recognized the stamp he bore, he found a certain grim pleasure in the conflict.
It was toward dusk on the second evening when they steamed into sight of a little schooner, which showed as a gray smear of slanted canvas scarcely distinguishable from the crag a couple of miles to lee of her. Jimmy wondered what she was doing there in that weather with only one jib and a reefed boom foresail set, until his glasses showed him that her mainmast was broken off. That made the thing clearer, and in case more should be wanted, a flag fluttered aloft and blew out half-way up her foremast upside down. It was an appeal that is very seldom made in vain at sea, and meant in that particular case that she would be ashore in an hour or two unless somebody towed her off.
Jimmy closed his glasses with a snap, and hailing a very wet seaman sent him for the engineer. The latter climbed to the bridge, and nodded when he glanced at the vessel.
"Well," he said, "you'll have to take them off. She's not going to claw off shore without her mainsail. There would be a little money in the thing if we could tow her, but we can't. I'm taking steep chances of bringing the engines down about my head by shoving her into it as I'm doing."
As though to give point to the speech, the Shasta flung her stern high just then, and shook in every plate as with a frantic clanging the engines ran away. Then she put her bows in, and dim crag and wallowing schooner were blotted out by a cloud of spray.