hem
the allowances it was necessary to make for the current on a bend,
the best way of getting off a bar, and the proper method of making a
landing.

"You shall make good pilot-man pratty soon," he said to Rob,
approvingly. "Not manny man come down the Colomby. That take
pilot-man, too."

"Well," said Rob, modestly, "we didn't really do very much of it
ourselves, but I believe we'd have run the rapids wherever the men did
if they had allowed us to."

"Batter not run the rapid so long you can walk, young man," said
Carlson. "The safest kind sailorman ban the man that always stay on
shore." And he laughed heartily at his own wit.

The boat tied up at the head of the Revelstoke Canyon, and here the
boys put their scanty luggage in a wagon which had come out to meet
her, and started off, carrying their rifles, along the wagon-trail
which leads from above the canyon to the town, part of the time on a
high trestle.

When they came abreast of the canyon they were well in advance of the
men, who also were walking in, and they concluded to go to the brink
of the canyon and look down at the water.

[Illustration: REVELSTOKE CANYON]

It was a wild sight enough which they saw from their lofty perch.
The great Columbia River, lately so broad and lakelike, was
compressed into a narrow strip of raging white water, driven down
with such force that they could see very plainly the upflung rib of
the river, forced above the level of the edges by the friction on the
perpendicular rock walls. From where they peered over the brink they
could see vast white surges, and could even distinguish the strange,
irregular swells, or boils, which without warning or regularity come
up at times from the depths of this erratic river. They quite agreed
that it would have been impossible for a boat to go through
Revelstoke Canyon alive at the stage of the water as they saw it. Rob
tried to make a photograph, which he said he was going to take home
to show to his mother.

"You'd better not," said John. "You'll get the folks to thinking that
this sort of thing isn't safe!"

The boys stood back from the rim of the canyon after a while and waited
for the others to come up with them.

"We think this one looks about as bad as anything we've seen, Uncle
Dick," said Rob. "A man might get through once in a while, and they
say Sam Boyd and Tom Horn did make it more than once before it got
them. It doesn't look possible to me to run it."

"The river