“‘A hurricane; bimeby by she blaw some more,’” I quoted bravely.  “It’s all right, Pochette; let her howl.  We’re going to cross, just the same.  It isn’t likely you’ll have to make the trip for any body else to-day.”  I didn’t mean to, but I looked over toward King, and caught the glint of his unfriendly eyes upon me.  Also, the corners of his mouth hunched up for a second in what looked like a sneer.  But the Lord knows I wasn’t casting any aspersions on his nerve.

He must have taken it that way, though; for he went out when we did and hooked up, and when we drove down to where the little old scow they called a ferry was bobbing like a decoy-duck in the water, he was just behind us with his team.  Pochette looked at him, and at us, and at the river; and his meager little face with its pointed beard looked like a perturbed gnome—­if you ever saw one.

“The leetle boat, she not stand for ze beeg load.  The weend, she—­”

“Aw, what yuh running a ferry for?” Frosty cut in impatiently.  “There’s a good, strong current on, to-day; she’ll go across on a high run.”

Pochette shook his head still more dubiously, till I got down and bolstered up his courage with a small piece of gold.  They’re all alike; their courage ebbs and flows on a golden tide, if you’ll let me indulge in a bit of unnecessary hyperbole.  He worked the scow around end on to the bank, so that we could drive on.  The team wasn’t a bit stuck on going, but Frosty knows how to handle horses, and they steadied when he went to their heads and talked to them.

We were so busy with our own affairs that we didn’t notice what was going on behind us till we heard Pochette declaiming bad profanity in a high soprano.  Then I turned, and he was trying to stand off old King.  But King wasn’t that sort; he yelled to us to move up and make room, and then took down his whip and started up.  Pochette pirouetted out of the way, and stood holding to the low plank railing while he went on saying things that, properly pronounced, must have been very blasphemous.

King paid about as much attention to him as he would to a good-sized prairie-dog chittering beside its burrow.  I reckon he knew Pochette pretty well.  He got his rig in place and climbed down and went to his horses’ heads.

“Now, shove off, dammit,” he ordered, just as if no one had been near bursting a blood-vessel within ten feet of him.

Pochette gulped, worked the point of his beard up and down like a villain in a second-rate melodrama, and shoved off.  The current and the wind caught us in their grip, and we swashed out from shore and got under way.

I can’t say that trip looked good to me, from the first rod out.  Of course, the river couldn’t rear up and get real savage, like the ocean, but there were choppy little waves that were plenty nasty enough, once you got to bucking them with a blum-nosed old scow fastened to a cable that swayed and sagged in the wind that came howling down on us.  And with two rigs on, we filled her from bow to stern; all but about four feet around the edges.