This was comforting intelligence, for at the moment the rain was coming down as if it never meant to stop, and the hills were quite hidden by a thick veil of mist. Mrs Greendays and I were pinned up in travelling rugs, for we had no macintoshes of our own and had firmly declined taking Colonel Deane’s and Captain Greendays’s, and in the walk to the river from the boarding-house our rubber-less shoes were soaked through and through. But we were not much better off on the launch than on the way to it. It was a tiny boat, very dirty, and with no covering or awning of any sort. The badly-painted seats were leaving great splotches of red paint on the clothes of those who had inadvertently sat on them, and even these seats were all occupied by earlier passengers when we arrived.
Luckily Captain Greendays espied an empty and unpainted bench on the upper deck, and seized upon it. There was just room for us all, and there we sat, in a row, cowering under our umbrellas, and huddled close perforce.
It continued to rain for an hour or so, but the mist cleared away from the hills soon after we started, and it was so fascinating to watch the kaleidoscopic changes as the windings of the river constantly altered the arrangements of their thousand peaks that I forgot all about the weather. I had even grown accustomed to the cold stream that was steadily trickling down my neck from Mrs Greendays’s umbrella, when Captain Greendays broke the spell by hailing a passing boatman.
“You might find something to put under these ladies’ feet!” he begged. “Can’t you spare that coil of rope?”
The man shook his head. The rope might be needed in shooting the rapids a little way farther down the stream.
“Then see if you can find a—sack—or a board—anything!”
The man went away, and presently returned with some narrow bits of wood from a broken candle-box, which he solemnly proceeded to place beneath our feet. We severally thanked him fervently for his well-meant effort and did not even smile until he had disappeared with a muttered word of acknowledgement for the tip slipped into his hand. Then Mrs Greendays broke into an irresistible laugh, and said:
“Well, Tom, if that was not a fowl-house we slept in last night,—and I still contend that it was fit for nothing else,—you can’t deny that we resemble a lot of roosters now, perched up on this bench with one foot screwed round the ankle of the other, and only just a toe on the deck to balance by!”
“And very ruffled feathers!” assented her husband, with a rueful smile.
Soon after this we had some exciting moments as we shot the rapids. Then we had to pull into the bank to wait for the bigger launch. By this time the rain had ceased, and as we watched the other boat come labouring up the stream with a vast amount of puffing and immense volumes of black smoke issuing from her funnel. Colonel Deane jumped ashore and returned in two minutes
