The voice came again and there was pleading in the shrill, staccato notes:

"Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!"

The cry from dreamland roused his consciousness at last. He sat up startled. There was no thought in his mind but the boats--the boats! In seconds, not minutes, he was in his clothes and stumbling down the dark stairway. There was something ghostly in the hollow echo of his footsteps on the plank sidewalk as he ran through the main street of the still village.

He saw that one boat was gone from its mooring before he reached the bank! He could see plainly the s.p.a.ce where it had been. The other boats were safe--but the fourth--. He stopped short on the bank for one brief second weak with relief. The fourth barge, which was holding it temporarily. The water by some miracle it had jammed against the third barge which was holding it temporarily. The water was slapping against the side that was turned to the stream and the other was b.u.mping, b.u.mping against the stern of the third boat but the loose barge was working a little closer to the current with each b.u.mp. A matter of five minutes more at the most and it would have been started on its journey to destruction.

Bruce sprang to the stern of the third barge and dragged the loose bow-line from the water. It was shorter by many feet--the stout, new rope had been cut! It was not necessary to strike a match--the starlight was sufficient to show him that. He stared at it, unable to credit his own eyes. He scrambled over the machinery to the stern. The stern-line was the same--cut square and clean. If further evidence was needed, it was furnished by the severed portion, which was still tied around a bush.

There was no more sleep for Bruce that night. Bewildered, dumfounded by the discovery, he rolled himself in a "tarp" and laid down on the boat's platform. So far as he knew he had not an enemy in the town. There seemed absolutely no reasonable explanation for the act.

XIX

AT THE BIG MALLARD

The sun rose the next morning upon an eventful day in Bruce's life. He was backing his judgment--or was it only his mulish obstinacy?--against the conviction of the community. He knew that if it had not been for their personal friendship for himself the married men among his boatmen would have backed out. There was excitement and tension in the air.

The wide, yellow river was running like a mill-race, bending the willows, lapping hungrily at the crumbling sh.o.r.e. The bank was black with groups of people, tearful wives and whimpering children, lugubrious neighbors, pessimistic citizens. Bruce called the men together and a.s.signed each boat its place in line. Beyond explicit orders that no boatman should attempt to pa.s.s another and the barges must be kept a safe distance apart, he gave few instructions, for they had only to follow his lead.

"But if you see I'm in trouble, follow Saunders, who's second. And, Jim, do exactly as Smaltz tells you--you'll be on the hind sweep in the third boat with him."

In addition to a head and hind sweepman each barge carried a bailer, for there were rapids where at any stage of the water a boat partially filled. The men now silently took their places and Bruce on his platform gripped the sweep-handle and nodded--

"Cast off."

The barge drifted a little distance slowly, then faster; the current caught it and it started on its journey like some great swift-swimming bird. As he glided into the shadow of the bridge Saunders started; before he turned the bend Smaltz was waving his farewells, and as Meadows vanished from his sight the fourth boat, the heaviest loaded, was on its way. Bruce drew a deep breath, rest was behind him, the next three days would be hours of almost continual anxiety and strain.

The forenoon of the first day was comparatively easy going, though there were places enough for an amateur to wreck; but the real battle with the river began at the Pine Creek Rapids--the battle that no experienced boatman ever was rash enough to prophesy the result. The sinister stream, with its rapids and whirlpools, its waterfalls and dangerous channel-rocks, had claimed countless victims in the old days of the gold rush and there were years together since the white people had settled at Meadows that no boat had gone even a third of its length. Wherever the name of the river was known its ill-fame went with it, and those feared it most who knew it best. Only the inexperienced, those too unfamiliar with water to recognize its perils so long as nothing happened, spoke lightly of its dangers.

Above the Pine Creek Rapids, Bruce swung into an eddy to tie up for lunch; besides, he wanted to see how Smaltz handled his sweep. Smaltz came on, grinning, and Porcupine Jim, bare-headed, his yellow pompadour shining in the sun like corn-silk, responded instantly to every order with a stroke. They were working together perfectly, Bruce noted with relief, and the landing Smaltz made in the eddy was quite as good as the one he had made himself.

Once more Bruce had to admit that if Smaltz boasted he always made good his boast. He believed there was little doubt but that he was equal to the work.

An ominous roar was coming from the rapids, a continuous rumble like thunder far back in the hills. It was not the most cheerful sound by which to eat and the meal was brief. The gravity of the boatmen who knew the river was contagious and the grin faded gradually from Smaltz's face.

Life preservers were dragged out within easy reach, the sweepmen replaced their boots with rubber-soled canvas ties and cleared their platform of every nail and splinter. When all were ready, Bruce swung off his hat and laid both hands upon his sweep.

"Throw off the lines," he said quietly and his black eyes took on a steady shine.

There was something creepy, portentous, in the seemingly deliberate quietness with which the boat crept from the still water of the eddy toward the channel.

The bailer in the stern changed color and no one spoke. There was an occasional ripple against the side of the boat but save for that distant roar no other sound broke the strained stillness. Bruce crouched over his sweep like some huge cat, a cougar waiting to grapple with an enemy as wily and as formidable as himself. The boat slipped forward with a kind of stealth and then the current caught it.

Faster it moved, then faster and faster. The rocks and bushes at the water's edge flew by. The sound was now a steady boom! boom! growing louder with every heart-beat, until it was like the indescribable roar of a cloudburst in a canyon--an avalanche of water dropping from a great height.

The boat was racing now with a speed which made the flying rocks and foliage along the sh.o.r.e a blur--racing toward a white stretch of churning spray and foam that reached as far down the river as it was possible to see. From the water which dashed itself to whiteness against the rocks there still came the mighty boom! boom! which had put fear into many a heart.

The barge was leaping toward it as though drawn by the invisible force of some great suction pump. The hind sweepman gripped the handle of the sweep until his knuckles went white and Bruce over his shoulder watched the wild water with a jaw set and rigid.

The heavy barge seemed to pause for an instant on the edge of a precipice with half her length in mid-air before her bow dropped heavily into a curve of water that was like the hollow of a great green sh.e.l.l.

The roar that followed was deafening. The sheet of water that broke over the boat for an instant shut out the sun. Then she came up like a clumsy Newfoundland, with the water streaming from the platform and swishing through the machinery, and all on board drenched to the skin.

Bruce stood at his post unshaken, throwing his great strength on the sweep this way and that--endeavoring to keep it in the centre of the current--in the middle of the tortuous channel through which the boat was racing like mad. And the hind-sweepman, doing his part, responded, with all the weight of body and strength he possessed, to Bruce's low-voiced orders almost before they had left his lips.

Quick and tremendous action was imperative for there were places where a single instant's tardiness meant destruction. There was no time in that mad rush to rectify mistakes. A miscalculation, a stroke of the sweep too little or too much, would send the heavily loaded boat with that tremendous, terrifying force behind it, crashing and splintering on a rock like a flimsy-bottomed strawberry box.

For all of seven miles Bruce never lifted his eyes, straining them as he wielded his sweep for the deceptive, submerged granite boulders over which the water slid in a thin sheet. Immovable, tense, he steered with the sureness of knowledge and grim determination until the boat ceased to leap and ahead lay a little stretch of peace.

Then he turned and looked at the lolling tongues behind him that seemed still reaching for the boat and straightening up he shook his fist:

"You didn't get me that time, dog-gone you, and what's more you won't!"

All three boats were coming, rearing and plunging, disappearing and reappearing. Anxiously he watched Smaltz work until a bend of the river shut them all from sight. It was many miles before the river straightened out again but when it did he saw them all riding safely, with Smaltz holding his place in line.

Stretches of white water came at frequent intervals all day but Bruce slept on the platform of his barge that night more soundly than he ever had dared hope. Each hour that pa.s.sed, each rapid that they put behind them, was so much done; he was so much nearer his goal.

On the second night when they tied up, with the Devil's Teeth, the Black Canyon and the Whiplash pa.s.sed in safety, Bruce felt almost secure, although the rapid that he dreaded most remained for the third and last day.

The boatmen stood, a silent group, at The Big Mallard. "She's a bad one, boys--and looking wicked as I've ever seen her." There was a furrow of anxiety between Bruce's heavy brows.

Every grave face was a shade paler and Porcupine Jim's eyes looked like two blue b.u.t.tons sewed on white paper as he stared.

"I wish I was back in Meennyso-ta." The unimaginative Swede's voice was plaintive.

"We dare not risk the other channel, Saunders," said Bruce briefly, "the water's hardly up enough for that."

"I don't believe we could make it," Saunders answered; "it's too long a chance."

Smaltz was studying the rocks and current intently, as though to impress upon his mind every twist and turn. His face was serious but he made no comment and walked back in silence to the eddy above where the boats were tied.

It was the only rapid where they had stopped to "look out the trail ahead," but a peculiarity of the Big Mallard was that the channel changed with the varying stages of the water and it was too dangerous at any stage to trust to luck.

It was a stretch of water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless--inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the sh.o.r.e it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallard was the supreme test of courage and boatmanship.

The river, running like a mill-race, shot straight and smooth down grade until it reached a high, sharp, jutting ledge of granite, where it made a sharp turn. The main current made a close swirl and then fairly leaping took a sudden rush for a narrow pa.s.sageway between two great boulders, one of which rose close to sh.o.r.e and the other nearer the centre of the river. The latter being covered thinly with a sheet of water which shot over it to drop into a dark hole like a well, rising again to strike another rock immediately below and curve back. For three hundred yards or more the river seethed and boiled, a stretch of roaring whiteness, as though its growing fury had culminated in this foaming fit of rage, and from it came uncanny sounds like children crying, women screaming.

Bruce's eyes were shining brilliantly with the excitement of the desperate game ahead when he put into the river, but nothing could exceed the carefulness, the caution with which he worked his boat out of the eddy so that when the current caught it it should catch it right.

Watching the landmarks on either sh.o.r.e, measuring distances, calculating the consequences of each stroke, he placed the clumsy barge where he would have it, with all the accurate skill of a good billiard player making a shot.

The boat reached the edge of the current; then it caught it full. With a jump like a race-horse at the signal it was shooting down the toboggan slide of water toward the jutting granite ledge. The blanched bailer in the stern could have touched it with his hand as the boat whipped around the corner, clearing it by so small a margin that it seemed to him his heart stood still.

Bruce's muscles turned to steel as he gripped the sweep handle for the last mad rush. He looked the personification of human daring. The wind blew his hair straight back. The joy of battle blazed in his eyes. His face was alight with a reckless exultation. But powerful, fearless as he was, it did not seem as though it were within the range of human skill or possibilities to place a boat in that toboggan slide of water so that it would cut the current diagonally, miss the rock nearest sh.o.r.e and shoot across to miss the channel boulder and that yawning hole beneath.

But he did, though he skimmed the wide-mouthed well so close that the bailer stared into its dark depths with bulging eyes.

The boat leaped in the spray below, but the worst was pa.s.sed and Bruce and his hind sweepman exchanged the swift smile of satisfaction which men have for each other at such a time.