ic serpentine dancer, madly pirouetting
across a carpet of stars. Then suddenly it all fell into a dull
ember-glow and flashed out. The ragged moon dropped out of the
southwestern sky. In the chill of the night, gray, dense fog wraiths
crawled upon the hidden face of the waters.

Again I dozed and awakened with the sense of having stopped suddenly. A
light wind had arisen and we were fast on a bar. Frank and I took our
blankets out on the sand, rolled up and went to sleep.

The red of dawn awoke us as though some one had shouted. Frank and I sat
up and stared about. A white-tail deer was drinking at the river's edge
three hundred yards away. So far as we were concerned, it was a
dream-deer. We blinked complacently at it until it disappeared in the
brush. Then we thought of the rifle.

We were all stiff and chilled. The boats were motionless in shallow
water. We all got out in the stream that felt icy to us, and waded the
crafts into the channel. Incidentally we remembered Texas and his
wisdom.

The time was early August; but nevertheless there was a tang of frost in
the air and the river seemed to flow not water but a thick frore fog. I
smelled persimmons distinctly--it was that cold; brown spicy persimmons
smashed on crisp autumn leaves down in old Missouri! The smell haunted
me all morning like a bitter-sweet regret.

We breakfasted on flapjacks and, separating the boats, put off. The
skiff left us easily and disappeared. A head wind arose with the sun and
increased steadily. By eleven o'clock it blew so strongly that we could
make no headway with the rude paddles, and the waves, rolling at least
four feet from trough to crest, made it impossible to hold the boat in
course. We quit paddling, and got out in the water with the line. Two
pulled and one pushed. All day we waded, sometimes up to our necks;
sometimes we swam a bit, and sometimes we clung to the boat and kicked
it on to the next shallows. Our progress was ridiculously slow, but we
kept moving. When we stopped for a few minutes to smoke under the lee of
a bank, our legs cramped.

To lay up one day would be only to establish a precedent for day after
day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clung
to the shoddy hope held out by that magic name--Milk River. We knew too
well that Milk River was only a snare and a delusion; but one must fight
toward something--it makes little difference what you call that
something. A goal, in itself,