My logbook speaks for that day as follows: "Left Benton at 2:30 p.m. Gypsied along under half gasoline for several hours, safely crossing the Shonkin and Grocondunez bars. Struck a rock in Fontenelle Rapids at 4:30, taking off rudder. Landed with difficulty on a gravel-bar and repaired damages. At 5:30 engine bucked. A heavy wind from the west beat us against a ragged shore for an hour and a half. Impossible to proceed without power, except by cordelling—which we did, walking waist-deep in the water much of the time. Paddles useless in such a head wind. The wind falling at sunset, we drifted, again losing our rudder while shooting Brule Rapids. Tied up at the head of Black Bluff Rapids at dusk, having made twenty miles out of two thousand for the first day's run. Have to extend that fifteen days! Just the same, that information bureau saw us leave under power!"
[ 1 ] Dear Reader: Should you undertake the Missouri River trip, don't lay anything out on spark-plugs. I sowed them all along up there. Take a drag-net. You will scoop up several hundred dry batteries, but don't mind them; they are probably spoiled.
CHAPTER V
THROUGH THE REGION OF WEIR
WE awoke with light hearts on the second morning of the voyage. All about us was the sacred silence of the wilderness dawn. The coming sun had smitten the chill night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the valley like a fairy lake.
We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and there were no birds to sing; but crows, wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung doleful voices downward into the morning hush—the spirit of the place grown vocal.
Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire of driftwood glowed ruddily. What is there about the tang of wood-smoke in a lonesome place that fills one with glories that seem half memory and half dream? Crouched on my haunches, shivering just enough to feel the beauty there is in fire, I needed only to close my eyes, smarting with the smoke, to feel myself the first man huddled close to the first flame, blooming like a mystic flower in the chill dawn of the world!