INTO THE ICE JAMB
“Ah!” sighed Gordon Duncan, as once more they caught sight of Timmie’s
raft. “We shall be up with him soon. Once we are close, when he sees my
face he will know it is I, his friend Gordon Duncan. We will bring him
and his treasure to the outside world. His last days shall be happy ones
after all.”
“But look!” exclaimed the girl, gripping his arm.
One look, and he started to his feet. The white-haired man before them
appeared to leap and dance upon the water. Appearances were deceiving.
The raft leaped and danced over rapids. And mingled with the rapids were
broken fragments and great heaps of ice. Here the water boiled and
foamed, there it rushed like mad.
“We shall all be drowned!” said the girl, gripping the old man’s arm.
“Trust God,” the man murmured. “I only fear for Timmie.”
Then, of a sudden, things happened. They had been coming nearer and
nearer to the clumsy raft when, as they turned a sharp bend in the river,
they saw that the aged recluse faced disaster. Stretching all the way
across the river was ice piled forty feet high. Jambing, screeching,
rolling and tumbling, it threatened all life that came near. And there
was the white haired recluse headed straight for it.
“He has only a pole. He can’t guide the thing. He’s lost!” groaned Gordon
Duncan.
He did not know the skill of the man. Poking at a cake of ice here,
fanning the water with his pole there, jabbing, poling, fighting his
best, the raftsman drove his clumsy craft toward the western bank. It
seemed that he would make the bank before the gurgling waters drew him
into that maelstrom. Faye held her breath and hoped.
Now he was thirty feet from the bank, now twenty, now—now he rose to his
feet as if for a try at a leap. His four dogs howled dismally. He looked
at them in dismay. That look was his undoing. An eddy caught his raft and
carried it toward midstream. The next instant a redoubled pull of current
shot him forward.
Only one hope remained. By the left shore, crowding thirty feet out over
the water, was a glacier-like snowbank. Solidly joined to the shore as it
was, this bank did not heave and roll as did the free ice. Only beneath
it the black waters raced. Between the hard packed snow and the river’s
surface was a broad dark line. This was an air space where the snow had
been worn away by higher water.
“He can’t go under,” Gordon Duncan breathed. “He’d be killed. He must
jump for the solid snow. It’s his only hope.”
The Indians in the skin canoe were battling the current to bring their
canoe ashore. As for Gordon Duncan and Faye, they had eyes only for the
drama that was being enacted there before them.
“Bravo!” murmured Gordon Duncan as a great dog, leaping far and wide,
made the snow bar in safety. One, two, three, four, the dogs were away.
And now, now! Faye breathed in little gasps. The recluse, standing erect,
motionless, prepared to leap. Now he bent low, now he sprang straight up
and away.
“He—he’s safe!” breathed Gordon Duncan.
But now. What happened? Did the current give the raft a sudden turn? Did
the old man’s strength suddenly fail? His leap fell short. He struck the
snow, tottered there for a second; then, as the raft with its load of
precious green gold shot into the darkness beneath the overhanging
snowbar, he tottered and fell full into the raging flood.
“He’s gone!” exclaimed Gordon Duncan. “Lost! Lost forever!”
The next instant their boat, guided by the trusty natives, bumped on a
shelving bank and they were quickly drawn up to safety.
In the meantime, as if to veil the catastrophe, a fog drifting down over
all, hid all, ice, snow and rushing river, from their view. Ten minutes
later a resounding roar told them that something terrific was happening
on the river.
“The ice jamb is broken,” Gordon Duncan said quietly. “The current is now
free. It came too late. We have lost!”
* * * * * * * *
Urged on by the impatient hunchback, Johnny fought his way forward
through tangled willows, over rock piles and down treacherous slopes of
melting snow until of a sudden, with an involuntary shout of joy, he came
plump against a large dugout turned upside down upon the ground.
To launch this craft, clumsy as it was, required but a moment’s time.
Such was the magnificent strength of the hunchback.
And now they had entered the race. With a paddle twice the size and
strength of the white man’s canoe paddle, the hunchback drove the dugout
forward in the rushing waters at a terrific pace.
It was Johnny who first heard the roar of the bursting ice jamb. They
were nearly two miles away, but it filled his breast with a wild terror.
That his friends rode the torrent before him he knew. What had happened
to them? What was about to befall him?
The current was swift. It bore them on rapidly. When the fog dropped down
upon them he realized that safety lay in seeking out shelter in some
quiet eddy close to the bank.
That this thought was in the hunchback’s mind soon became evident. He
began hugging the shore.
So intent were they upon reaching a place of safety that they failed to
note a picture framed in fog that for ten seconds flashed into view, then
was lost forever.
Without knowing why they did so, both Faye Duncan and her grandfather
stood upon the bank as they passed. It was Faye’s keen eyes that caught
sight of the racing dugout.
“Look!” she cried, quite beside herself. “Johnny, Johnny Longbow and the
great banshee!” She was quite beside herself with excitement.
“Calm yourself,” said Gordon Duncan. “You must be dreaming. A bad dream.
I see nothing.”
“I did see them!” she insisted vehemently. “They passed, they passed in
the fog!”
“Then,” said Gordon Duncan, “we shall doubtless see them later.”
“But will we? They are riding the flood. The ice jamb is gone. But there
may be others. And, he is with that terrible creature.”
“Humanity,” said Gordon Duncan quietly, “is everywhere very much alike.
He is in God’s hands. Beyond doubt the All Seeing One has provided him a
friend in this vast wilderness.”
“And to think,” said the girl more calmly, a great joy expressed in her
tones, “he is alive! He is not dead. Johnny Longbow is not dead!”
She did such a wild dance in the snow that Gordon Duncan could well have
believed they were home again and all their troubles over.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime Johnny and his strange pilot had passed on into the fog.
They traveled a good three miles before they came to the haven of refuge
they sought, a quiet eddy by the bank of the stream.
With a sigh of relief Johnny unbent his cramped limbs and went ashore.
To his surprise he found the earth soggy with seeping water.
“Been a flood,” he thought.
This was true. The breaking of the ice jamb had momentarily clogged the
stream. Water had risen rapidly. The bayou had been flooded. Sudden as it
had come, so sudden it receded. Not, however, until something had
happened. What this was, Johnny was soon to know.
As he climbed the slope in search of a dry spot, to his vast
astonishment, stranded high and dry, he came upon a crude raft laden with
strange packages bound up in skins. And clinging to the raft, as if it
were still in motion, was a white haired old man.
Johnny wondered at the packages and the man, but he did not wonder long.
“This,” he told himself, “is Timmie, the recluse. And the packages on the
raft!” His heart beat wildly.
“But first this old man’s needs must be attended to.”
After disengaging his hands from the raft, Johnny helped the hunchback
carry the old man up the hill to a dry spot. There they soon had him
stripped of his sodden garments and wrapped in their own deerskins before
a roaring fire.
There, for the first time, he opened his eyes and murmured something
about “Green gold.”
It was four hours later that the boy was wakened from a short doze by the
fire by the ring of a rifle shot close at hand.
“Someone near,” he told himself. “Wonder who?”
“Hello! Hello there!” he shouted.
“Hello yourself,” came back from the hills above.
Three minutes later the boy stood staring in astonishment at four persons
who had just emerged from the brush, two Indians, a white man and a girl.
There were tears of real joy in his eyes, for the man and girl were his
long lost friends Gordon Duncan and Faye.
Their story was quickly told. No longer daring to trust themselves to the
treacherous waters, the party had pushed forward on foot in the hope, as
had been their good fortune, though in a manner quite unexpected, of
finding some trace of the aged recluse and his craft.
As they followed an animal trail a young caribou had appeared before
them. One of the Indians had shot it. This shot had told Johnny of their
presence.
So now, here they were all together again. And Timmie was with them. What
a joyous reunion it was! Even Timmie, who recognized his pal of other
days, seemed happy.