At The Big Mallard

: The Man From The Bitter Roots

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 shore. The bank was black

with groups of people, tearful wives and whimpering children, lugubrious

neighbors, pessimistic citizens. Bruce called the men together and

assigned each boat its place in line. Beyond explicit orders that no

boatman should attempt to pass 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 shore 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 shell.

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 passed, 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 passed 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 buttons 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 shore 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 passageway between two great

boulders, one of which rose close to shore 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 shore, 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 shore 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 passed and Bruce

and his hind sweepman exchanged the swift smile of satisfaction which

men have for each other at such a time.



"Keep her steady--straight away." He had not dared yet to lift his eyes

to look behind save for that one glance.



"My God! they're comin' right together!"



The sharp cry from the hind sweepman made him turn. They had rounded the

ledge abreast and Smaltz's boat inside was crowding Saunders hard.

Saunders and his helper were working with superhuman strength to throw

the boat into the outer channel in the fraction of time before it

started on the final shoot. Could they do it! could they! Bruce felt his

lungs--his heart--something inside him hurt with his sharp intake of

breath as he watched that desperate battle whose loss meant not only

sunk machinery but very likely death.



Bruce's hands were still full getting his own boat to safety. He dared

not look too long behind.



"They're goin' to make it! They're almost through! They're safe!"

Then--shrilly--"They're gone! they've lost a sweep."



Bruce turned quickly at his helper's cry of consternation, turned to see

the hind-sweep wildly threshing the air while the boat spun around and

around in the boiling water, disappearing, reappearing, sinking a little

lower with each plunge. Then, at the risk of having every rib crushed

in, they saw the bailer throw his body across the sweep and hold it down

before it quite leaped from its pin. The hind-sweepman was scrambling

wildly to reach and hold the handle as it beat the air. He got it--held

it for a second--then it was wrenched out of his hand. He tried again

and again before he held it, but finally Bruce said huskily----



"They'll make it--they'll make it sure if Saunders can hold her a little

longer off the rocks."



His own boat had reached quieter water. Simultaneously, it seemed, both

he and his helper thought of Smaltz. They took their eyes from the boat

in trouble and the hind-sweepman's jaw dropped. He said

unemotionally--dully--as he might have said--"I'm sick; I'm

hungry"--"They've struck."



Yes--they had struck. If Bruce had not been so absorbed he might have

heard the bottom splintering when she hit the rock.



Her bow shot high into the air and settled at the stern. As she slid

off, tilted, filled and sunk, Smaltz and Porcupine Jim both jumped. Then

the river made a bend which shut it all from Bruce's sight. It was half

a mile before he found a landing. He tied up and walked back, unexcited,

not hurrying, with a curious quietness inside.



Smaltz and Jim were fighting when he got there. Smaltz was sitting

astride the latter's chest. There were epithets and recriminations,

accusations, counter-charges, oaths. The Swede was crying and a little

stream of red was trickling toward his ear. Bruce eyed him calmly,

contemplatively, thinking what a face he made, and how ludicrous he

looked with the sand matted in his corn-silk hair and covering him like

a tamale casing of corn-meal as it stuck to his wet clothes.



He left them and walked up the river where the rock rose like a monument

to his hopes. With his hands on his hips he watched the water rippling

around it, slipping over the spot where the boat lay buried with some

portion of every machine upon the works while like a bolt from the blue

the knowledge came to him that since the old Edison type was obsolete

the factories no longer made duplicates of the parts.



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