old bath and lose our teams, if no worse.

Soon as I thought of that, I began unhooking the traces of the horse
nearest. The poor brutes ought at least to have a chance to swim for it.
Frosty caught on, and went to work, too, and in half a minute we had them
free of the wagon and stripped of everything but their bridles. They would
have as good a show as we, and maybe better.

I looked back to see what King was doing. He was having troubles of his
own, trying to keep one of his cayuses on all its feet at once. It was
scared, poor devil, and it took all his strength on the bit to keep it
from rearing and maybe upsetting the whole bunch. Pochette wasn't doing
anything but lament, so I went back and unhooked King's horses for him,
and took off the harness and threw it in the back of his wagon so they
wouldn't tangle their feet in it when it came to a show-down.

I don't think he was what you could call grateful; he never looked my way
at all, but went on cussing the horse he was holding, for acting up just
when he should keep his wits. I went back to Frosty, and we stood elbows
touching, waiting for whatever was coming.

For what seemed a long while, nothing came but wind and water. But
I don't mind saying that there was plenty of that, and if either one had
been suddenly barred out of the game we wouldn't any of us have called the
umpire harsh names. We drifted, slippety-slosh, and the wind ripped holes
in the atmosphere and made our eyes water with the bare force of it when
we faced the west. And none of us had anything to say, except Pochette; he
said a lot, I remember, but never mind what. I don't suppose he was
mentally responsible at the time.

Then, a long, narrow, yellow tongue of sand-bar seemed to reach right out
into the river and lap us up. We landed with a worse jolt than when we
broke away from the cable, and the gray-blue river went humping past
without us. Frosty and I looked at each other and grinned; after all, we
were coming out of the deal better than we had expected, for we were still
right side up and on the side of the river toward home. We were a mile or
so down river from the trail, but once we were on the bank with our rig,
that was nothing.

We had landed head on, with the nose of the scow plowed high and dry.
Being at the front, we went at getting our team off, and our wagon. There
was a four or five-foot jump to make, and the horses didn't know how about
it, at first. But with one of us pu