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.