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They let the canoe drive down the rapid while the boulders flashed by them, for there was the same desire in all of them, and that was to get as far as possible away from that horrible pool. At last Mattawa, standing up forward, poled the canoe in where a deep ravine rent the dark rock's side, and the party went ashore, wet and gasping. Wheeler looked back up the gorge and solemnly shook his head.
"The strikers were not prepared to earn higher pay and that one word, 'demanded, makes a big difference. Hello! who is the stranger?" Mattawa Tom was directing a horseman towards the shanty, and Geoffrey, who watched the newcomer with growing interest, found something familiar in his face and figure, until he rose up in astonishment when the man rode nearer.
"I want to point out that this is very vague," he objected. "The question will arise where the labour is to be applied. It would, for instance, be scarcely judicious to give a man a claim on everybody else for draining his own land." He would have said more, but that Tom of Mattawa laid a hard hand on his shoulder and jerked him back into his chair. "Now," Tom admonished, "you just sit down.
Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining certificates, blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson Bay. And right from the start he was confident of winning.
He gasped with relief when Mattawa ran the bow of the canoe in upon the shingle, and then rose and stretched himself wearily. The four men stepped ashore. Curiously they looked about them, for they had had little opportunity for observation.
The walls of rock stood further apart at this point, and there was a strip of thinly-covered shingle and boulders between the fierce white rush of the flood and the worn stone. Mattawa grinned as the others looked at him. "I'm staying here to hang on to the canoe," he said. "Guess you don't feel quite like going down that fall."
"There are men with money Martial, and more of them in the cities waiting to take away from us what we expect to get, and since we have to fight them, it seems to me advisable to strike where it's possible." He laughed harshly. "There'll be two feet less water in the valley before the morning." "But no heading," cried Mattawa. "Well," replied Nasmyth simply, "we'll start another one.
Then Mattawa ran the canoe in between two boulders at the head of the rapid, and they got out and stood almost knee-deep in the cold water. The whirling haze of spray which rose and sank was rent now and then as the cold breeze swept more strongly down the cañon, and it became evident that the rapid was a very short one.
"From what he told me I can count upon your doing the best that's in you, Tom." "I won't go back on nothing Mr. Thurston said," was the quiet answer; but when Tom from Mattawa left Savine, whose nerveless fingers spilled half the contents of the silver cup he strove to fill, gasping beside the stove in Thurston's quarters, he gravely shook his head.
I think you foolishly told him he couldn't count straight." "I did," admitted Tom from Mattawa. "Louis ain't great at counting, and he allowed he'd never let go of the key to the powder magazine." "I fancy a smart mechanic could make a key that would do as well," remarked Geoffrey.
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