Of all who had started out with us but a few had got this far. Of these Mervin and Hewson were far in front, victors of the trail, qualified to rank with the Men of the High North, the Sourdoughs of the Yukon Valley. Somewhere in the fleet were the Bank clerk, the Halfbreed and Bullhammer, while three days' start ahead were the Winklesteins.
"These Jews have the only system," commented the Prodigal; "they ran the 'Elight' Restaurant in Bennett and got action on their beans and flour and bacon. The Madam cooked, the old man did the chores and the girl waited on table. They've roped in a bunch of money, and now they've lit out for Dawson in a nice, tight little scow with their outfits turned into wads of the long green."
I kept a keen lookout for them and every day I hoped we would overtake their scow, for constantly I thought of Berna. Her little face, so wistfully tender, haunted me, and over and over in my mind I kept recalling our last meeting.
At times I blamed myself for letting her go so easily, and then again I was thankful that I had not allowed my heart to run away with my head. For I was beginning to wonder if I had not given her my heart, given it easily, willingly and without reserve. And in truth at the idea I felt a strange thrill of joy. The girl seemed to me all that was fair, lovable and sweet.
We were now skimming over Tagish Lake. With grey head bared to the breeze and a hymn stave on his lips, Salvation Jim steered in the strong sunlight. His face was full of cheer, his eyes alight with kindly hope. Leaning over the side, the Prodigal was dragging a spoon-bait to catch the monster trout that lived in those depths. The Jam-wagon, as if disgusted at our enforced idleness, slumbered at the bow. As he slept I noticed his fine nostrils, his thin, bitter lips, his bare brawny arms, tattooed with strange devices. How clean he kept his teeth and nails! There was the stamp of the thoroughbred all over him. In what strange parts of the world had he run amuck? What fair, gracious women mourned for him in far-away England?
Ah, those enchanted days, the sky spaces abrim with light, the gargantuan mountains, the eager army of adventurers, undismayed at the gloomy vastness!
We came to Windy Arm, rugged, desolate and despairful. Down it, with menace and terror on its wings, rushes the furious wind, driving boats and scows crashing on an iron shore. In the night we heard shouts; we saw wreckage piled up on the beach, but we pulled away. For twelve weary hours we pulled at the oars, and in the end our danger was past.
We came to Lake Tagish; a dead calm, a blazing sun, a seething mist of mosquitoes. We sweltered in the heat; we strained, with blistered hands, at the oars; we cursed and toiled like a thousand others of that grotesque fleet. There were boats of every shape, square, oblong, circular, three-cornered, flat, round—anything that would float. They were made mostly of boards, laboriously hand-sawn in the woods, and from a half-inch to four inches thick. Black pitch smeared the seams of the raw lumber. They travelled sideways as well as in any other fashion. And in such crazy craft were thousands of amateur boatmen, sailing serenely along, taking danger with sang-froid, and at night, over their camp-fires, hilariously telling of their hairbreadth escapes.
We entered the Fifty-mile River; we were in a giant valley; tier after tier of benchland rose to sentinel mountains of austerest grandeur. There at the bottom the little river twisted like a silver wire, and down it rowed the eager army. They shattered the silence into wildest echo, they roused the bears out of their frozen sleep; the forest flamed from their careless fires.
The river was our beast of burden now, a tireless, gentle beast. Serenely and smoothly it bore us onward, yet there was a note of menace in its song. They had told us of the canyon and of the rapids, and as we pulled at the oars and battled with the mosquitoes, we wondered when the danger was coming, how we would fare through it when it came.