The next morning Alex none the worse for his wetting, was astir long before the other boys were awake. He had determined, during the night, to make restitution for the rowboat he had lost.
“There’s plenty of cedar trees up here,” he thought, “and if I can find a fallen one just the right size, I can make a canoe that will take the place of the rowboat. Of course,” he mused, “it wasn’t exactly my fault that the boat was lost. The rope broke when Captain Joe made a jump and landed in the prow. Still, if I hadn’t been foolish with Teddy, the boat never would have broken away from me.”
Where the great canyons came down to the water’s edge, cutting the precipitous side of the mountains into ridges, there were plenty of cedar trees, and the boy, after softly lifting the anchor and turning the Rambler down stream, watched long for a fallen tree of the size he wanted.
It was doubtful if he could bring the boat close up to the shore, for sometimes the land sloped gradually down, and sometimes there were hidden rocks which had tumbled from the mountain side, but he decided to try to do so as soon as he came to a suitable place, a place where there were great trees growing close to the water’s edge.
A dozen miles down stream from the spot where the night had been passed, the boy saw that the current, setting against the shore, had cut a cove into a bluff. Certain that the water would be deep at the edge of the drop, he worked the Rambler in and was soon overjoyed to see that he could stretch a plank from the railing to a ledge which, being followed to the north, would lead to a canyon of some size, the bottom and sloping sides of which were lined with magnificent cedar trees.
He cast anchor and laid out the plank. Then he turned about to see if any of his chums were awake, but all were sleeping except Captain Joe, who lay with his chin on his paws regarding Teddy, still asleep. Captain Joe seemed to Alex to be asking the bear why he had presumed to use him for a ferry boat on the previous evening, and the boy laughed heartily at thought of the scene under the flashlight.
He beckoned to the dog, threw a rope around Teddy’s neck and fastened it to the railing, thus making sure that he would not escape, and, followed by the dog, stepped over the plank to the ledge, from which he passed to the bottom of the canyon. The morning was sharp with frost, but the atmosphere was clear as crystal. It was like looking into a calm sea of blue, transparent glass to look up at the sky bending over the valley of the Columbia. The breath of the cedars was sweet to the nostrils of the boy, and the songs of the birds were pleasant things to hear.
“This beats Clark street!” Alex thought, moving about in the canyon in quest of a fallen cedar tree of a size suitable for canoe-making.
A green tree would take too long to fashion into a boat, and one too long on the ground would rot too soon, so he hunted for a long time before he came upon just what he sought.
An hour later, when Clay, missing the boy and the dog, followed the plank to the ledge and then a column of smoke to the interior of the canyon, he found Alex sitting on a log watching a serpent of flame running along the upper surface of a fallen cedar tree. The boy had made a trench along the top of the log and poured kerosene into it. Then he had set fire to the oil, and the tree trunk was gradually burning out in the middle. A pail of water sat on the ground near the boy, and as Clay watched he saw him arise and wet the edges of the trench, so that only the center of the log would burn. The flames, reinforced now by dry limbs gathered from the thicket, were already deep down into the heart of the long log. Clay’s approach was announced by the dog, and Alex looked up with a curious look of perplexity on his freckled face.