There are many men who live and die with the undisputed reputation of being good fellows—your friends and mine—who, if put to the test, would fail miserably. Fortunate is that man to whom it is not given to test all of his friends. This is not cynicism; it is only human nature; and I love human nature, being myself possessed of so much of it. I admire it when it stands firmly upon its legs, and I love it when it wabbles. But when it gains power with increasing odds, grows big with obstacles, I worship it.
"To thrill with the joy of girded men,
To go on forever and fail, and go on again—
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night—"
Thus it should have been. But that night, staring into the face of three of the four, I saw the yellow streak. The Kid was not one of the three. The first railroad station would hold out no temptation to him. He was a kid, but manhood has little to do with age. It must exist from the first like a tang of iron in the blood. Age does not really create anything—it only develops. Your wonderful and beautiful things often come as paradoxes. I looked for a man and found him in a boy.
Bill talked about home and stared into the twilight. The "floaters" were irritable, quarreling with the fire, the grub, the cooking-utensils, and verbally sending the engine to the devil.
Seeing about eighteen hundred miles of paddle work ahead, knowing that at that season of the year the prevailing winds would be head winds, and having very little faith in the engine under any conditions, I decided to travel day and night, for the water was falling steadily and already the channels were at times hard to find. Charley and Frank grumbled. I told them we would split the grub fairly, a fifth to a man, and that they might travel as slowly as they liked, the skiff being their property. They stayed with us.
We lashed the boats together and put off into the slow current. A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill star-sheen.
There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We seemed suspended in a hollow globe. Now and then the boom of a diving beaver's tail accented the clinging quiet; and by fits the drowsy muttering of waterfowl awoke in the adjacent swamps, and droned back into the universal hush.
Frank and I stood watch, the three others rolling up in their blankets among the luggage. It occurred to me for the first time that we had a phonograph under the cargo. I went down after it. At random I chose a record and set the machine going. It was a Chopin Nocturne played on a 'cello—a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brushing of sick wings across the gates of heavens never to be entered; and then the finale—an insistent, feverish repetition of the human ache, ceasing as with utter exhaustion.