“Slow and sure,” repeated Thurstane.  “It’s a five minutes job.  Keep your courage and your feet for five minutes.  Then we’ll live a hundred years.”

“Liftinant, is this soldierin’?” squealed Sweeny.

“Yes, my man, this is soldiering.”

“Thin I’ll do me dooty if I pull me arrms off.”

But there was not much talking.  Pretty nearly all their breath was needed for the fight with the river.  Glover, a slender and narrow-shouldered creature, was particularly distressed; and his only remark during the pilgrimage shoreward was, “I’d like to change hosses.”

Sweeny, leading the way, got up to his waist once and yelled, “I’ll drown.”

Then he backed a little, took a new direction, found shallower water, and tottled onward to victory.  The moment he reached the shore he gave a shrill hoot of exultation, went at his bearskin craft with both hands, dragged it clean out of the water, and gave it a couple of furious kicks.

“Take that!” he yelped.  “Ye’re wickeder nor both yer fathers.  But I’ve bate ye.  Oh, ye blathering jerkin’, bogglin’ baste, ye!”

Then he splashed into the river, joined his hard-pressed comrades, got his head under the centre of the Buchanan, and lifted sturdily.  In another minute the precious burden was safe on a large flat rock, and the three men were stretched out panting beside it.  Glover was used up; he was trembling from head to foot with fatigue; he had reached shore just in time to fall on it instead of into the river.

“Ye’d make a purty soldier,” scoffed Sweeny, a habitual chaffer, like most Irishmen.

“It was the histin’ that busted me,” gasped the skipper.  “I can’t handle a ton o’ water.”

“Godamighty made ye already busted, I’m a thinkin’,” retorted Sweeny.

As soon as Glover could rise he examined the Buchanan.  There was a ragged rent in the bottom four inches long, and the canvas in other places had been badly rubbed.  The voyagers looked at the hole, looked at the horrible chasm which locked them in, and thought with a sudden despair of the great environment of desert.

The situation could hardly be more gloomy.  Having voyaged for five days in the Great Canon, they were entangled in the very centre of the folds of that monstrous anaconda.  Their footing was a lap of level not more than thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation.  Above them rose a precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was undoubtedly a mile in height.  Had there been armies or cities over their heads, they could not have discovered it by either eye or ear.

At their feet was the Colorado, a broad rush of liquid porphyry, swift and pitiless.  By its color and its air of stoical cruelty it put one in mind of the red race of America, from whose desert mountains it came and through whose wildernesses it hurried.  On the other side of this grim current rose precipices five thousand feet high, stretching to right and left as far as the eye could pierce.  Certainly never before did shipwrecked men gaze upon such imprisoning immensity and inhospitable sterility.