This settled, the
senior seemed to feel relieved of a weight. He even saw and relished
certain funny phases of the incident, though he never ceased to
foretell different kinds of trouble for the company, varying in range
from mere complaints to the most tremendous of damage suits.
He was much interested, finally, in our methods of travel, and then, in
logical sequence, with what he could see about him. He watched
curiously my loading of the canoe, for I had a three-mile stretch of
open water, and the wind was abroad. Deuce's empirical boat wisdom
aroused his admiration. He and his son were both at the shore to see me
off.
Deuce settled himself in the bottom. I lifted the stern from the shore
and gently set it afloat. In a moment I was ready to start.
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" suddenly cried the father.
I swirled my paddle back. The old gentleman was hastily fumbling in his
pockets. After an instant he descended to the water's edge.
"Here," said he, "you are a judge of fiction; take this."
It was his steamboat and railway folder.
IX.
ON FLIES.
All the rest of the day I paddled under the frowning cliffs of the hill
ranges. Bold, bare, scarred, seamed with fissures, their precipice
rocks gave the impression of ten thousand feet rather that only so many
hundreds. Late in the afternoon we landed against a formation of
basaltic blocks cut as squarely up and down as a dock, and dropping off
into as deep water.
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