“Well, you boys hardly deserve to have good folks out looking for you, the way you’ve behaved,” was his greeting. “What under the sun made you leave your tent and get chased by the trail? Eh? That’s what I’d like to know.”
It took but a minute to explain the real state of affairs, and but another to see Charley Drake hurrying along on his way to his sick partner at Dawson.
“Pretty close shave, that,” Walt Masters said, as they prepared to get aboard and paddle back to camp.
“Sure!” Chilkoot Jim replied, rubbing his stiffened biceps in a meditative fashion.
BIG TIMBER BEACON
By John L. Mathews
There were three government beacon-lights in Big Timber Bend, and the uppermost of them was Barney Layton’s. It was nothing more than a lantern set in a frame against a white target on the top of a post, fifty feet from the edge of the deep bank of the Mississippi River. It was at the very head of the bend, at the foot of the “crossing” by which the channel came from the lower end of Silverplate Bend over into Big Timber. It stood there so that the pilots on river steamers, coming down, could set the bows of their boats toward it, and run straight and true in the channel between the lower end of McAlpin’s Bar and the head of Nodaway Towhead.
When the river was low, this channel was both shoal and narrow, and the white target by day and the bright lantern by night had been gladly welcomed by pilots who had figured their way over the crossing in old days by sounding-pole and luck.
Every night at sunset Barney climbed the levee in front of his mother’s cabin, walked the half-mile down to the head of Big Timber, and out by a path he had made through the big timber itself to his light-post, carrying the lantern, which he set in place and lighted. Every morning he came early to put it out and carry it home for cleaning and filling. For this the government paid his mother seventy-five dollars a year, besides furnishing the oil and other supplies; and seventy-five dollars a year is a considerable amount behind a levee in lower Arkansas.