The currents of the respective channels came together almost at right angles, that of the main one flowing at perhaps eight miles an hour. Ordinarily I would have eased into this by running parallel to it and conforming my course to the direction of the stronger current. In my anxiety to get quick way on across the current, however, I did not take the time to do this. On the contrary, indeed, pulling as hard as I could, I drove the light skiff almost head-on into the swiftly speeding green bolt of the main current. The effect, naturally, was something like that of a man's walking into the side of a moving street car. The boat did precisely what a man walking into a car would do—went reeling and staggering sideways in an effort to keep from rolling over and over. She spun round twice before I got her under control, and of course shipped a lot of green water—all of it in Holt's section. It wasn't enough to bother much, though, and I had no trouble in pulling clear of the danger point with yards to spare. Holt went quietly to bailing. I was conscious of a mild thrill of elation at the thought of the sousing I was giving him in spite of the "doughnut," but he didn't seem to be worrying about it quite as much as I would have liked.

There was less excuse for Joe's having trouble at this point, because it was almost in his back yard—one of his favourite fishing riffles, in fact. It may be that the fact that I was crowding him closely from behind made him nose into the main channel faster than he would have done had he been on his own. I was too busy with my own troubles to see what happened to him, so could only judge from the tremolo of his high-keyed cursing. Holt, however, who had a grandstand seat for the twin performances, said that the canvas canoe was thrown just about on its beams' ends, and that nothing but the newly installed water-line air-chambers, prevented a complete swamping.

The bend below the Northern Pacific bridge was one of the two or three places of which I seemed to have retained much of a mental picture from my previous run. Twenty years before the main channel was cutting heavily into a low bluff on the left, bringing down an enormous quantity of big round boulders. The short, savage riffle formed by these had given us our first severe mauling on that earlier ride. Now I found the river had broadened greatly, pouring a shallow current through a channel two or three hundred yards wide. But it was still swift, very swift—altogether relentless in its onward urge. It is the almost complete absence of slack-water stretches that differentiates the five hundred miles of the Yellowstone between Gardiner and Glendive from any other great river I can recall. It is this that makes it so nearly ideal for boating.

JOE EVANS WHO PILOTED ME THE FIRST HALF DAY
PETE HOLT AND JOE EVANS WITH THEIR INFLATED LIFE PRESERVERS
"CHICKENS, CHILDREN AND HOGS"

It didn't take us long to discover that as a pilot Joe was not an asset. Personally he was a source of never-ending delight; also artistically. His funny little craft with its inner-tube bilge keels, no less than the bobbing of that football life-preserver, lent touches to the picture that could have been blocked in by no other media. But what made Joe's piloting fail to qualify was the fact that instead of trying to find the channel he was trying to find floaters—to earn one or both of those twenty-five-dollar rewards that were offered for the finding of the bodies of the people drowned the previous week. I wanted all the deep, clear, unobstructed channel there was to be had; the very nature of Joe's quest kept him edging in toward snags and bars and shallows. These little incidentals didn't bother him a bit. The instant he saw the water shoaling dangerously he simply jumped overboard, grabbed his feather-weight craft by the nose and trotted right out on dry land.

Now this wouldn't have troubled seriously if—save the mark!—I had also been using an unladen canvas canoe. But with my outfit, a passenger, and a boat whose ability to withstand collisions with rocks and snags had still to be proved, Joe's little jump-out, pick-up and trot-off manœuvre was a difficult one to follow. Twice, because there was no alternative either time, I did the best I could to go through his motions. All I succeeded in doing—besides getting pulled down and rolled—was proving that the bottom of my boat would bang for fifty feet over shallowly submerged rocks without holing. While that latter was reassuring, I couldn't see any reason for going on and proving it over and over again. If the constant drop of water wears away the hardest stone it seemed perfectly reasonable to believe that the constant biff of boulders might batter through the hardest bottom. And I wanted that bottom to do me for from twenty-five to thirty-five hundred miles yet.

That was the reason why when, entangled in a maze of shoaling channels, Joe picked up his canoe and trotted up on a bar for the third time, I had the corner of a wild-weather eye lifting for a possible gateway of escape. A short, sharp chute cascading off to the right seemed to fill the bill, but by a narrow squeeze. A rough tumble of green-white water drove full at a caving gravel bank, reared up and fell over on its back in a curling wave, serpentined between the out-reaching claws formed by the roots of two prostrate cottonwood trees, and then recovered from its tantrum in a diminuendo of whirlpools in the embrasure of a brown cliff. It was the kind of a place which you knew you could run if all went right, but which you usually didn't try for fear that one of a half dozen things might go wrong. I should hardly have tackled it in cold blood, even in a boat I was thoroughly used to; but I had just enough dander up over the prospect of another bumping on Joe's bar to be just a bit careless of consequences. It was that sort of "Might-as-well-be-hanged-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb" feeling that a man ought to eliminate from his system as a first step in fitting himself for work in rough water. It had always troubled me a bit, but I had it sufficiently in check to keep it from asserting itself unless I was very tired or slightly huffed. This time, I fear, there was just a bare ruffle of huffiness easing the brake of my wonted restraint.

I was over the dip at the head of that chute before I knew it—likewise, out into the swirls at the foot of it. I was conscious only of a sudden dive, the loom of the back-curling wave—which the skiff, heeling half over, was taking as a racing car round a steeply-banked turn,—a tangle of roots to left and right, and then the serpentining through the whirlpools. She had hardly shipped a bucket of solid water—most of it over her bows as she tipped off the curling wave.