We had landed head on, with the nose of the scow plowed high and dry.  Being at the front, we went at getting our team off, and our wagon.  There was a four or five-foot jump to make, and the horses didn’t know how about it, at first.  But with one of us pulling, and the other slashing them over the rump, they made it, one at a time.  The sand was soft and acted something like quicksand, too, and we hustled them to shore and tied them to some bushes.  The bank was steep there, and we didn’t know how we were going to make the climb, but we left that to worry over afterward; we still had our rig to get ashore, and it began to look like quite a contract.

We went back, with our boot tracks going deep, and then filling up and settling back almost level six steps behind us.  Frosty looked back at them and scowled.

“For sand that isn’t quicksand,” he said, “this layout will stand about as little monkeying with as any sand I ever met up with.  Time we make a few trips over it, she’s going to be pudding without the raisins.  And that’s a picnic, with our rig on the main deck, as you might say.”

We went back and sat swinging our legs off the free board end of the ferry boat, and rolled us a smoke apiece and considered the next move.  King was somewhere back between our rig and his, cussing Pochette to a fare-you-well for having such a rotten layout and making white men pay good money for the privilege of risking their lives and property upon it.

“We’ll have to unload and take the wagon to pieces and pack everything ashore—­I guess that’s our only show,” said Frosty.  We had just given up my idea of working the scow up along the bar to the bank.  We couldn’t budge her off the sand, and Pochette warned us that if we did the wind would immediately commence doing things to us again.

Frosty’s idea seemed the only possible way, so we threw away our cigarettes and got ready for business; the dismembering and carrying ashore of that road-wagon promised to be no light task.  Frosty yelled to Pochette to come and get busy, and went to work on the rig.  It looked to me like a case where we were all in the same fix, and personal spite shouldn’t count for anything, but King was leaning against the wheel of his buggy, cramming tobacco into his stubby pipe—­the same one apparently that I had rescued from the pickle barrel—­and, seeing the wind scatter half of it broadcast, as though he didn’t care a rap whether he got solid earth beneath his feet once more, or went floating down the river.  I wanted to propose a truce for such time as it would take to get us all safe on terra firma, but on second thoughts I refrained.  We could get off without his help, and he was the sort of man who would cheerfully have gone to his last long sleep at the bottom of that boiling river rather than accept the assistance of an enemy.