At first as far as he could tell one place was as bad as another to descend. Gradually he made out that by great good fortune he had chosen the right side of the river. Toward the other bank the white surface was everywhere pointed with ugly black rocks. He saw that the greatest volume of water rushed down close to the shore on which he stood. If he could keep his boat in the middle of it there was no danger of rocks. There remained the danger of those strange, great billows which curled and rolled and roared without ever advancing an inch in their paths.
He returned to his boat, fighting his terror of the place. Refusing to think of it, he worked desperately to make all snug. He got in and clung to a branch that trailed in the water, while the increasing current sucked at his little craft. He had fallen out of the habit of articulate prayer; maybe he prayed in his own way. He let go of the branch, and began to drift toward the place. He moistened his lips, and drew a long breath, and drove his paddle into the water. No turning back then.
Then he took the plunge, and was filled with an amazing exhilaration.
The struggle was brief. His boat plunged her nose right under the first curling white billow and half a ton of water fell aboard. She staggered drunkenly, and in spite of his desperate paddling swung broadside in the current. The next billow raked him from stem to stern, rolled his boat completely under and washed him clear of it. The opposed currents of the water clutched at him and racked him like whirling machinery. He came to the surface gasping, only to be flung violently against a rock, striking on his shoulder. Stunned by the buffeting and the roar, he was carried on down like a rotten log, now underneath, now on top, the plaything of every wild eddy.
Struggling instinctively, in the end he found himself somehow in still water. He crawled out on the beach and lay inert, struggling for breath and for consciousness. Very slowly the realization of his plight was forced on him. He felt no great concern. It was like something that might have happened to somebody else. There lay a poor devil cast ashore in the wilderness hundreds of miles from any fellow-creature. Everything he possessed, boat, food, matches, axe, blankets, gun and ammunition were at the bottom of the river. Out of the wreck he had saved only Nahnya's necklace, which was sewed to his shirt, and his pocketbook with money, neither article being of the slightest service to keep life in his body.
He sat up, roused by an imperious pain. Looking sideways and down at himself he was mildly impressed by the extraordinary conformation of his right shoulder—like somebody else's shoulder. It was dislocated. He could not lift his right arm. It was a mercy, if but a small one, that his faculties began to work so slowly. His first articulate thought was:
"Well, thank God! I got a skinful of breakfast before I lost it!"
XVI
THE TWO GIRLS
A traveller might have descended through the Spirit River pass half a dozen times without suspecting the vicinity of any fellow-creatures in the hundred miles of mountains. Nevertheless there was a white man's camp at the foot of Mount Milburn. Milburn is the hoary-headed monarch that stands guard on the right-hand side of the gateway to the Rockies. It rises sheer from the river to a height of more than six thousand feet. In the country it is otherwise called the Mountain of Gold because it has long been known that one of the buttresses of its base is entirely composed of a metal-bearing quartz.