The Man From The Bitter Roots

They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from shore when Bruce cried sharply: "Hold her steady! Wait!"

The needle wavered--agitated unmistakably--then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North.

Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke---"John, we've GOT her!"

"I see her!" Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft. "Lookee," he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, "see her there--like a shadow--her bow is shoved up four--five feet above her stern. Got her?"

Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys.

"The water'll drop a foot yet," Bruce said excitedly. "Can you dive?"

"First cousin to a musk-rat," the Swede declared.

"We'll build a raft like a hollow square, use a tripod and bring up the chain blocks. What we can't raise with a grappling-hook, we'll go after. John, we're going to get it--every piece!"

"Bet yer life we'll get her!" John cried responsively, "if I has to git drunk to do it and stand to my neck in water for a week."