construction, lifted her prow another inch or two, and flung the rapids
behind her.

Slim, fleet, clean-heeled, and hungry for distance, she raced toward the
Benton landing two miles up.

In my anxiety to show her to the benevolent ones, I left the current and
took a crosscut over a rocky ford. Pebbles flung from her pounding heels
showered down upon me. I climbed forward and let her hammer away. She
cleared the gravel bar, and as she plunged past the now silent
information bureau on the landing, condescendingly I waved a hand at
them and went on splitting water.

We shot under the bridge, forged into the crossing current, passed the
big brick hotel, where a considerable number came out to salute us.
They dubbed her the fastest boat that had ever climbed that current, I
learned afterward. Alas! I was getting my triumph early and in one big
chunk! I figure that that one huge breakfast of triumph, if properly
distributed, would have fed me through the whole two thousand miles of
back-strain and muscle-cramp. And yet, through all the days of
snail-paced toil that followed, I remained truly thankful for that early
breakfast.

The Kid and the Cornishman, busy in camp with the packing for the
voyage, had shared in the gloom of my temporary defeat. But now, as I
plunged past them, I could see them leaping into the air and cracking
their heels together with delight. They had wet every plank of her with
their sweat, and they were as proud as I. In the light of the following
days, their delight dwindled into a pathetic thing.

I held her on her course up-stream, reached the bend a mile above, swung
round and--discovered that she had only then begun to lift her heels!
With the rapid current to aid, her speed was truly wonderful. She could
have kept pace with any respectable freight train at least.

I indulged in a little feverish mental calculation. She could make, with
the minimum current, eighteen miles per hour. Every day meant fifteen
hours of light. Sioux City was two thousand miles away. We could reach
Sioux City easily in ten days of actual running!

While I was covering that fast mile back to camp I saw the _Atom I_
passing Sioux City with an air of high-nosed contempt. I developed a
sort of unreasoning hunger for New Orleans--a kind of violent thirst for
the Gulf of Mexico! Nothing short of these, it seemed to me, could be
worthy of so fleet a craft. When I shoved her nose into the landing, I
found that my compani