t enough square-sawed four-inch joists to make poles for fifty
miles of telephone--and right in a country where there are better
telephone-poles than you could get at Montreal! So they were all
brought through, with what trouble you can imagine, since you have
seen the sort of transport they must have had coming this far. The
factor could not use them all, so he put up a few and laid the others
in the form of a sidewalk. I'll say it's lasting, at least!

"As for those horses, however," he continued, "we'll take a crack at
them ourselves if we have luck. You've been complaining that things
are not exciting enough, and I propose to give you a touch of life.
After we get done our work here--that is to say, after everybody has
drunk up all the Scotch whisky that has come north on this boat--we'll
be getting on about our business. We'll take our scow through.

"I'm going to contract with old Johnny Belcore, the traffic-handler
here, to take our boat and an extra scow around through the rapids of
the Slave River. You'll see he'll ship his horses along to use on the
portages, and there'll be more than one of them. It would take a lot
of men to track one of these boats up the bank and along a mile or so
of dry ground. They tell me that he uses rollers and pulls the boats
by horse power. So, as that is one more example of the way the brigade
gets its goods north, we'll use that, if only for the sake of our own
information."

"That'll be fine," said Rob. "I'd much rather do that than climb on
top of a lumber-wagon and ride across sixteen miles of muskeg. If we
did that we'd miss all the excitement of seeing the Big Rapids of the
Slave. I've been reading about them. You're right, this is perhaps as
bad boat water as any actually used by men."

"Do you suppose it is worse than the White Horse Rapids up on the head
of the Yukon?" asked John, looking up.

Uncle Dick laughed at this. "Son," said he, "the White Horse Rapids
could be lost a thousand times here in the falls of the Slave River,
and no one would know where they went. Those rapids got their
reputation through the stories of tenderfeet, for the most part. They
don't touch the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca, and the Grand Rapids
don't touch the Slave. She drops a hundred and sixty-five feet in
sixteen miles! You can figure what that means, and if you can't figure
it we'll see it with our own eyes."

"I read once in some sort of a magazine story," said Rob, "that the
Pea