With that infernal mystery cleared up, my mind was free to note and take advantage of a rather remarkable incidental phenomenon. The effect of oil on troubled waters was no new thing to me, for on a number of occasions I had helped to rig a bag of kerosene-soaked oakum over the bows of a schooner hove-to in a gale; but to find a stretch of water already oiled for me at just the time and place I was in the sorest need of it—well, I couldn’t see where those manna-fed Children of Israel wandering in the desert found their advance arrangements looked to any better than that. The savage wind-whipped white-caps that were buffeting me in mid-stream dissolved into foam-streaked ripples the moment they impinged upon the broadening oil-sleeked belt where the petroleum had seeped riverward from the sprayed beach. A solid jetty of stone could not have broken the rollers more effectually. On one side was a wild wallow of tossing water; on the other—as far as the surface of the river was concerned—an almost complete calm.
It was a horrible indignity to heap upon Imshallah (and, after the way she had displayed her resentment following her garbage shower under the Wenatchee bridge, I knew that spirited lady would make me pay dear for it if ever she had the chance); still—dead beat as I was—there was nothing else to do but to head into that oleaginous belt of calm and make the best of it. The wind still took a deal of bucking, but with the banging of the waves at an end my progress was greatly accelerated. Hailing the black devils on the bank, I asked where the nearest village was concealed, to learn that Moosier was a couple of miles below, but well back from the river. They rather doubted that I could find my way to the town across the mudflats, but thought it might be worth trying in preference to pushing on in the dark to Hood River.
Those imps of darkness were right about the difficulty of reaching Moosier after nightfall. A small river coming in at that point seemed to have deposited a huge bar of quicksand all along the left bank, and I would never have been able to make a landing at all had not a belated duck-hunter given me a hand. After tying up to an oar, he very courteously undertook to pilot me to the town through the half-overflowed willow and alder flats. As a consequence of taking the lead, it was the native rather than the visitor who went off the caving path into the waist-deep little river. Coming out of the woods, a hundred-yards of slushing across a flooded potato-patch brought us to the railway embankment, and from there it was comparatively good going to the hotel. Luckily, the latter had a new porcelain tub and running hot water, luxuries one cannot always be sure of in the smaller Columbia River towns.
CITY OF PORTLAND WITH MT. HOOD IN THE DISTANCE
It was just at the close of the local apple season, and I found the hotel brimming over with departing packers. Most of the latter were girls from Southern California orange-packing houses, imported for the season. Several of them came from Anaheim, and assured me that they had packed Valencias from a small grove of mine in that district. They were a good deal puzzled to account for the fact that a man with a Valencia grove should be “hobo-ing” round the country like I was, and seemed hardly to take me seriously when I assured them it was only a matter of a year or two before all farmers would be hobos. It’s funny how apple-packing seems to bring out all the innate snobbery in a lady engaging in that lucrative calling; they didn’t seem to think tramping was quite respectable. I slept on the parlour couch until three in the morning, when I “inherited” the room occupied by a couple of packettes departing by the Portland train. As they seem to have been addicted to “attar of edelweiss,” or something of the kind, and there hadn’t been time for fumigation, I rather regretted making the shift.
