"Why, sonny," he said, "you are sho'ly playing touchwood."
And Rogers realized with something of a shock in what a limp, nerveless manner he was clinging to that friendly pine. He straightened himself up with a shaky laugh.
"No," he said, "it's been puss-in-the-corner, with the biggest cinnamon I have ever seen. He went off there to the right when he heard you coming. For Heaven's sake, try for a shot at him."
But Fox was already off through the scrub, murmuring to himself as he hurried, "Puss in-the-corner! My sakes! An' whatever ha-ad the young fool done with his gun?"
Rogers crossed over to the shack, where he found Bantling anxious to hear the trouble, but casting a concerned and hungry eye round in search of the supper that should have been awaiting them, and was not. However, a fire of dry pine-knots was soon lit, a frying-pan put on with cold pork and beans, tea made, and they exchanged accounts of adventures as they ate.
It seemed that Fox and Bantling had been led by the Swede about two miles down the river bank, over very bad ground full of muskegs, which are patches of slimy bog and water. When they reached the scene of the catastrophe, they found three men calmly sitting round a fire they had built on the bank, smoking their pipes and staring at their boat, which they had left forlornly wedged between two rocks, not far out from the bank, without even attempting to unload her. It was a queer-looking craft, like an enormous punt, with a great square sail, heaped untidily with a mixed pile of stores without any attempt at balance. The wonder was that they had managed to get so far.
It was a typical case of incompetence expecting to succeed in a country that will only consent to accept the best that every man has to give. Men start off to venture up the unknown reaches of these Arctic rivers without the slightest knowledge of what is before them. They will vaguely announce that the only essential is "grit," and deem such things as a knowledge of carpentry and shipbuilding and a smattering of geology entirely superfluous.
Such a party were these four men, all their boasted grit taken clean out of them, by hardship, sitting down before their stranded boat, trading on the unwritten law of the wild that each man must help his brother.
Bantling and Fox set them to work unloading, which they did with much grumbling; then yoked them into the tow-lines and set them to haul, while they stood up to their waists in water levering up the boat with spruce poles. When she at last floated it was with several seams badly sprung, which meant she had to be beached and caulked.
Having seen to this, and feeling they had done enough, the two Americans started back, having been away nearly two days.