his wrath, "be d----d to you,
then! Drink yerself to death, ef you want to--the sooner the better;"
and, with this parting adjuration, and an extra shake, the old mountain
man, who had drank barrels of alcohol himself with comparative immunity
from harm, turned his back upon this younger degenerate victim of modern
whisky, and strode out of the room and the house, without stopping to
reply to the renewed entreaties of his friends to remain and "make a
night of it."
Making directly for the wharf, where his boat was moored, half filled
with water, he hastily bailed it out, pushed off, and, dropping the oars
into the row-locks, bent to the work before him; for the tide was
already beginning to run up, and the course he had to take brought him
dead against it for the first two or three miles, after which the tide
would be with him, and, if there should not be too much sea, the labor
of impelling the boat would be materially lessened.
The lookout from a small boat was an ugly one at three o'clock of this
rainy December afternoon. A dense, cold fog had been rolling in from the
sea for the last half hour, and the wind was rising with the tide. Under
the shelter of the hills at the foot of which Astoria nestled, the wind
did not make itself felt; but once past "The Point," and in the exposed
waters of Young's Bay, the south-westers had a fair sweep of the great
river, of which the bay is only an inlet. One of these dreaded storms
was preparing to make itself felt, as Chillis had predicted, and as he
now saw by the way in which the mist was being blown off the face of the
river, and the "white-caps" came instead. Before he arrived off the
Point he laid down his oars, and, taking out of his coat-pocket a
saturated yellow cotton handkerchief, proceeded to tie his old soft felt
hat down over his ears, and otherwise make ready for a struggle with
wind and water--neither of them adversaries to be trifled with, as he
knew.
Not a minute too soon, either; for, just when he had resumed the oars,
the boat, having drifted out of her course, was caught by a wave and a
blast on its broadside, and nearly upset.
"Steady, little gal," said Chillis, bringing his boat round, head to the
wind. "None o' your capers now. Thar is serious work on hand, an' I want
you to behave better'n ever you did afore. It's you an' me, an' the
White Rose, this time, sure," and he pressed his lips together grimly,
and peered out from under his bent old hat
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