A short time before noon they came to a sharp bend in the creek where the nature of the bank hid the current ahead from the boys in the two boats. Suddenly the Indians towing the leading craft stopped, and as three held it against the current, the leader of the team beckoned to Swiftwater, who had fallen behind.
“Carry,” he said, briefly, to the latter as he came up, and pointed to the stream ahead.
“He means a portage,” said the miner to Jack, who was walking with him, as they topped the rise, they went forward to inspect the creek. Directly in front of them where the stream had made a turn, the heavy timber of the forest had retreated back from the water for several hundred yards and the elevated shore sank to almost the level of the water, and became half swamp and half meadow, covered with tufts of grass, and nearer the woods with a stunted growth of brush and small dwarf birches. Gold Creek itself spread out to nearly twice its former width, with innumerable little sandbars and a few boulders protruding from the bottom. Even Jack’s unpractised eye could see that the current had no depth of any moment.
“Stake out,” said Swiftwater to the Indians. “We’ll have to portage.” The Indians at once drove the steel anchorage stakes which they carried into the soil and drew the bow of the boats up against the bank and took similar precautions with the stern of each. The Scouts had all joined Jack and Swiftwater at the top of the bank, where the commander of the expedition pointed out that the widening of the Gold had so reduced the depth of the channel that it would be impossible to take the fully loaded boats over the route. As a result most of the cargo if not all of it would have to be unloaded, and perhaps “toted” around the shallow to the deep water of the channel.
“A good deal of work, isn’t it?” inquired Dick.
“There’s no freighting de luxe up in this country that I ever found,” replied the miner. “We shall be lucky if we can get along without a ‘carry.’ First thing we’ve got to know is how much water we’re drawing on each boat fore and aft. Gerald, you’re nominated boat measurer, and you can take Pepper with you. You will find two or three lumber gauges in the dunnage in the rear boat. Each of you take one, and let me know at once what each boat is drawing. Rand, you and Dick are leadsmen of this voyage, and you will each take a pair of knee boots and a lumber gauge and follow the channel of the Creek from shore to shore and give me the greatest depth of water you can find in a continuous channel up to where the creek narrows again and the water will naturally deepen. If you will wait a few minutes we will give you the data to work on. Jack, you and I will take up a job of stevedorin’ and get our longshoremen to work. You take three of these Injuns and get to work unloading this first boat, and I’ll take the others and rustle cargo on the other. Most o’ these pieces can be jacked up the gangplanks, but where they’re too heavy in either boat we’ll call all hands and get ’em ashore.”
By this time, Gerald and Pepper were armed with two slim painted woodstaffs, not unlike the wands of the Boy Scouts, but marked with figures, and having at one end a movable arm about two inches long that could be screwed fast at any point. These they fastened at the extreme end of each gauge, and hooked them under the bottoms of the boats and marking the top of the water were able to tell just what each boat was drawing. They found, however, that the boats did not trim exactly even, and that at one point or another, bow or stern, the draught was more or less by perhaps an inch. The general average was about twenty-six inches in one boat and twenty-eight inches in the other.
“These here ocean greyhoun’s had a displacement, as they say in ocean goin’ craft, of six inches before they were loaded,” said Swiftwater, “when I had ’em measured in White Horse, and if the channel anywhere above here peters out to that it’s a case of carrying all this stuff around this meadow land. If we can get even two inches above that the job’ll be easier.” With the above figures in mind, Rand and Dick plunged into the shallows of the broad channel. Working from rock to sandbar, and bar to boulder, they followed the deepest pools in a tortuous path that corkscrewed nearly from one shore to another, and in an hour’s time were able to report to Swiftwater that they could find passageway sufficiently wide for the boats with a minimum depth of fourteen inches.
When they made their report to Swiftwater, a look of intense satisfaction crossed his face, and he remarked:
“Wa-al, I guess that cuts out one big engineerin’ problem that might o’ kept us here a week. Hustle that freight off; smallest pieces first.” The channel figures were reported to Gerald and Pepper, and they were instructed to measure frequently the draught of the boats as the stuff was moved ashore, and to report to the miner when the draught was reduced to eleven inches.