t night, staring into the face of three
of the four, I saw the yellow streak. The Kid was not one of the three.
The first railroad station would hold out no temptation to him. He was a
kid, but manhood has little to do with age. It must exist from the
first like a tang of iron in the blood. Age does not really create
anything--it only develops. Your wonderful and beautiful things often
come as paradoxes. I looked for a man and found him in a boy.

Bill talked about home and stared into the twilight. The "floaters" were
irritable, quarreling with the fire, the grub, the cooking-utensils, and
verbally sending the engine to the devil.

Seeing about eighteen hundred miles of paddle work ahead, knowing that
at that season of the year the prevailing winds would be head winds, and
having very little faith in the engine under any conditions, I decided
to travel day and night, for the water was falling steadily and already
the channels were at times hard to find. Charley and Frank grumbled. I
told them we would split the grub fairly, a fifth to a man, and that
they might travel as slowly as they liked, the skiff being their
property. They stayed with us.

We lashed the boats together and put off into the slow current. A
haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the
flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished
ebony--a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of
dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant
ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill
star-sheen.

There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very
limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense
of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We
seemed suspended in a hollow globe. Now and then the boom of a diving
beaver's tail accented the clinging quiet; and by fits the drowsy
muttering of waterfowl awoke in the adjacent swamps, and droned back
into the universal hush.

Frank and I stood watch, the three others rolling up in their blankets
among the luggage. It occurred to me for the first time that we had a
phonograph under the cargo. I went down after it. At random I chose a
record and set the machine going. It was a Chopin _Nocturne_ played on a
'cello--a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brushing
of sick wings across the gates of heavens never to be entered; and then
the f