Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

I was chuckling to myself all the time Joe rattled on. The priceless old chap had been in business at the same stand twenty years ago, but it was plain he did not recognize me as the first-baseman of the Livingston champeen nine. As a matter of fact, I was just as glad that he didn't—right there before the truck-driver at least. For I had some recollection of having been with our brake-beam-riding right fielder the evening "Lefty" Clancy tried to palm a moss agate out of one of Joe's trays—and got caught. Joe made "Lefty" disgorge, and then delivered himself of remarks more pointed than polite respecting the morals of Livingston's imported ball-players.

As I have intimated, I didn't care to have that episode dragged out before the truck-driver, who might have passed it right on to Pete Holt and Editor Phillips. So I just sat tight for the moment, thanked Joe for his warnings and drove on when he got out of breath. But late that afternoon I went to his shop and made a clean breast of everything. I confessed about the moss agate, and also to the fact that I was the youth who held the steering paddle for Sydney Lamartine the time the still unbroken river record of six hours to Big Timber was put up. Then we both grinned, shook hands and apologized to each other. I apologized to Joe for seeming to have aided and abetted "Lefty" in trying to get away with the moss agate, and Joe apologized to me for that warning about the Yellowstone. There was a delicate and subtle compliment in his handsome admission that he felt that his was the greater wrong, even allowing for the fact that there were still two or three moss agates missing when he finally checked over the tray. In this latter connection, Joe said that for a year or two he had the feeling that he had made a tactical error in not turning out my pockets as well as "Lefty's" when he made his search. Then, one day, "Lefty" came in and sold him back the agates. "I didn't say anything," said Joe with a chuckle. "Just paid him a dollar apiece for the streakies, and then turned about and sold him for ten dollars an old Colt's that had laid under the snow all winter and wasn't worth six-bits. It seemed to me the kinder way," he concluded.

Of course a man of so mellow and inclusive a charity as that was easy for me to become fond of. Joe and I made friends quickly, and he fell in very readily with the plan to go along in his canvas boat when I started and help Pete Holt look for the two floaters.

Ten minutes sufficed to knock off the crate and set the boat up on the floor of the blacksmith shop. It consisted of a bow and a stern section, each about seven feet in length and provided with a thwart and a water-tight compartment. Indeed, each section was really a complete boat in itself, awkward in shape, to be sure, yet something that would float on an even keel and which could be propelled by oars or paddles. Bolting these two sections together produced a fourteen-foot skiff of astonishingly good lines. The sides, it is true, were inches lower than I would liked to have had them, but there was something distinctly heartening in the fine flare of the bows and the pronounced sheer of the little craft. Heartening, also, was the comment of the helper working to patch up a gunwale smashed in transit. He said it was the darndest hard tin he ever tried to put a drill through. Equally reassuring was the blacksmith's complaint over the trouble he was having in hammering out a number of little dents. I may as well add here that that transit-crushed gunwale was the worst scar my pretty tin toy was to show when I docked it finally in St. Louis after bumping something like 2500 miles down the Yellowstone and Missouri.

The bright little shallop looked so inherently water-worthy that I dragged it down to the river and jumped in without further misgivings. Its lightness was highly refreshing, especially when I remembered the back-breaking job it had been dragging for only a few feet the wooden skiff I had used on the lower Columbia. Built to be pulled from the forward section, carrying its load aft, it was down heavily by the head until I trimmed ship by taking in the blacksmith. My own sodden two hundred and forty pounds still brought it a bit too low by the bows, but I readily saw how the weight of my outfit and ballast would correct this until I shipped my outboard motor at Bismarck. The trial was eminently satisfactory. I dodged back and forth across the current, ran a short riffle, and then swung round and pulled right back up through it. Some water was shipped, but not enough to bother. There would be no dearth of dampness in the real rapids, I could see; but those air-chambers should float her through in one way or another, and water was easily dumped at the first eddy.

When, on pulling up to the bank to land, I tossed the painter to some one waiting below the blacksmith shop, I acknowledged the proper sex of the little craft for the first time. "Catch the line and ease her in!" was what I said, or something to that effect. That meant she had convinced me that she was a regular fellow—that I was quite game to trust myself out alone with her day or night. And that is just what I did, and for something like sixty or seventy days and nights. Saucy and spirited, and at times wilful, as she proved to be, that confidence was never betrayed.

Late that afternoon Pete Nelson called on me at the hotel, heading a delegation from the Park County Chamber of Commerce with the request that I permit the name of Livingston, Montana, to be painted upon my boat. Pete's inherent delicacy must have made him sense the fact that operating as a sandwich-man in any form was the one thing above all others from which my shrinking nature recoiled. Turning his hat nervously in his hands, the spokesman went on to explain and expatiate.

"Livingston was also the name of a great explorer. You're a sort of explorer yourself, boy. Kind of appropriate to unite the two ideas. Would also let the folks down river know that the little old town was right on the map. Full of enterprise, too, sending its emissaries on 4000-mile river voyages...."

"Back up, Pete," I cut in. "This little voyage is my own idea, not Livingston's. But go to it with the paint if you really think it will turn any settlers this way. This little old town gave me my start in life, and I am not going to lay myself open to the charge of ingratitude, no matter at what cost to my personal feelings. Only please don't insist on my flying a pennant or wearing a cap with the city slogan on it. What is the motto, by the way?"

"Live Lively in Livingston!" chanted the delegation in unison, as though delivering itself of a college yell. Pete opined it was a good slogan, with a lot of multum in parvo about it; but of course, if that was the way I felt....