The delegation bowed itself out and adjourned to a sign-painter's shop to discuss the practical side of the affair now that the diplomatic preliminaries were disposed of. The next morning I found "LIVINGSTON, MONT." streaming in bold capitals along port and starboard bows and across the stern of my argosy. The blacksmith said there had been some discussion anent blazoning the words in foot-high letters the whole length of the bottom, on the theory, it appears, that this would be the most conspicuous part of the boat in the event it capsized and continued on to New Orleans without its skipper. Whether they really carried out that inspired plan I never learned. The first sand bar I hit below Livingston would have effectually erased the letters in any event. Indeed, I was only too happy to find that it hadn't scoured a hole through the bottom itself.
We had planned to push off by nine o'clock of the morning of June thirtieth, but various odds and ends of delays and interruptions held us over an hour. Most of these were in the form of elderly ladies who had lost near relatives in the river and chose this as the fitting occasion to tell me about it. I have some recollection of speaking with a friend or connection of Sydney Lamartine. Sydney had died from some cause I made out, but whether from the river or not I did not learn. Some one else chimed in with a boat-upset story just at that juncture and things got a bit mixed. I was mighty sorry to hear about Lamartine, though. He pulled a strong oar and had no end of nerve—real river stuff.
When I came to ask the blacksmith how much I owed him, he scratched his head for a few moments and then asked if I thought a dollar would be too much. As the boat had been around his shop three or four days, with himself or a helper tinkering on little things about it much of the time out of pure kindliness, I told him I did not think it was and asked him to let me take his picture for fear I should never find another like him. I needn't have worried on that score, however. From first to last, practically all of the people I had to do with along each of the three great rivers I navigated had to be pressed before they would take any pay at all for services. Indeed, I recall but two who seriously tried to put anything over. One was the clerk of the local Ritz-Carlton at Billings, who tried to charge me two days' rent for a room I had occupied but one, and the other was a farmer's wife near Sibley, Missouri, who was going to collect twenty-five cents from me for a quart of skim milk. In the latter instance the husband of the offender came along in time to intervene in my behalf and give the woman a good tongue-lashing for trying to cheat a "po stranghah who wasn't no low down tramp no how and maybe was writin' fo the papahs." In the former case the "po stranghah" found justice denied him until he actually had to prove that he occasionally did write for the "papahs." I wouldn't have recalled either of these instances if they had chanced in the course of an ordinary trip, for the very good reason there would have been so many others of the same kind that my memory would not have compassed them all. I have remembered them, and gone to the trouble of mentioning them here, because that sort of thing isn't general practice along the river-road.
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PETE HOLT AND JOE EVANS |
HAULED OUT AT THE FOOT OF A ROUGH RAPID |
A SHARP PITCH ON THE UPPER YELLOWSTONE |
Just before starting, and purely as a gesture, I offered Pete Holt the use of my Gieve inflatable life-preserver jacket. This handy little garment I had worn in the North Sea during the war, and it had also stood me in good stead on the Columbia the previous Fall. Now I was really very keen for its reassuring embrace myself on that first day's run, and if I had thought Holt would take it I would never have offered it. When he rose to that jacket like a hungry trout to a fly I felt toward him about as one does toward a man who asks you to say "When"—and then stops pouring when you do say it. I had no legitimate complaint of course. It was entirely my own fault. Just the same, the unlucky denouement cramped my style from the outset. I had intended giving Pete a deliberate spill in some safe-looking rapid just to pay him for a few things he had done to me with the ski. I gave up the idea entirely now. That "doughnut" of air under his arms meant that he would probably bob through with dry hair while I serpentined over and under an oar. It also meant that he was going to worry a lot less about the state of the water than I hoped he would, for auld lang syne, that is. It also meant that I was going to worry rather more. It was an unfortunate move on my part altogether. Subject to that self-imposed handicap I think I did pretty well. I am sure Pete would have confessed that night that there were two or three new kinds of thrills in the world that he wotted not of before, even though that confounded "doughnut" must have acted as a good deal of a shock-absorber throughout.
Joe Evans, pushing off in his canoe from the dock of his river home a couple of hundred yards below, gave the signal for casting off. The current caught the bow as the honest blacksmith relinquished the painter and the boat swung quickly into the stream. Some boys raised a spattering cheer, the people who had lost relatives and friends in the river shook their heads dubiously, and Pete Nelson, raising three fingers aloft, shouted: "Here's luck!" He seemed a good deal elated because the Chief of Police was going away.
We were off—or nearly so. When I turned from the crowd's acclaim to con ship I discovered a good thick stream of green water slopping in, now over one quarter, now over the other. And whichever side it splashed from, Pete was getting the full benefit of it. "I hate to start crabbing at this stage, Skipper," he said with a wry grin, "but it's that confounded ballast of yours that's doing it. It's putting her rails right under."
I squinted critically down the port gunwale; then down the starboard. When she rode on an even keel either rail was a good two inches above water. But when she lurched in even the gentlest swell, one rail or the other went a good inch under. "You're right," I acquiesced. "Heave it over." One by one the units of that precious pile of junk from the blacksmith shop scrap-heap went to the bottom—a Ford axle, a mower gear, the frame of a harrow, some fragments of "caterpillar" tractor tracks, the drive wheel of a sewing machine. All of two hundred pounds of choice assorted scrap Pete heaved over, keeping but a single hunk of rusty iron that I thought I might use for an anchor at night in avoiding some pernicious stretch of mosquito coast on the lower river. She still rode low, but trimmed perfectly as soon as Pete finished bailing.
All down through the town they were waving us kindly farewells from the bank, and at the H Street bridge, where "Buckskin Jim" Cutler had been picked up the night before, we ran the gauntlet of another crowd. Then the people began to thin out and we had the river to ourselves. With the main channel streaming white a few hundred yards ahead I settled to the oars for the sharp initiatory test I knew awaited us there. We had closed up to within fifty feet of Joe by now, and saw for the first time the remarkable precautionary measures he had taken to insure the safety of himself and his canoe. For himself he had a blown-up football tied to the back of his belt, an arrangement very similar to the block of wood Chinese houseboat dwellers tie to their boy, though not to their comparatively worthless girl, children. Along both gunwales of the canoe were further air installations—these in the form of long lengths of inflated inner tubes. The practical worth of the latter contrivances was to be proved inside of half a minute. Of the efficacy of a football tied to the back of the belt as a life-preserver I had some doubts. It seemed to me, however, that the elevation of that particular section of the anatomy could only be secured at the cost of putting the head under water. Not being quite sure, I deemed it best not to shake Joe's confidence by telling him of my doubts.
The Yellowstone divides a half mile or so above the Main Street bridge, not far from the point where Jim Cutler was knocked from his raft. The northerly channel, flowing by Livingston has perhaps a third of the volume of the southerly one. The two unite not far below the H Street bridge. In doing a bit of advance scouting down stream a day or two previously I made particular mental note of a point, just below the confluence, at which the current drove with great force close to the left bank. Here, either snags or slightly submerged boulders made a messy stretch of water that I saw at a glance it would not do to get a boat into. However, a good sharp pull across the current from the point the main channel was entered would be enough to avoid trouble—if nothing went wrong.