The boat crews were waiting when they had finished, and they were soon under way.  A mile of comparatively slack water brought them out into one of the larger estuaries of the river, and there the long, uphill pull began.  O’Neil had equipped his two companions with high rubber boots, which they were only too eager to try.  As soon as they got ashore they began to romp and play and splash through the shallows quite like unruly children.  They spattered him mischievously, they tugged at the towing-ropes with a great show of assistance, they scampered ahead of the party, keeping him in a constant panic lest they meet with serious accident.

It was with no little relief that he gave the order to pitch camp some hours later.  After sending them off to pick wild currants, with a grave warning to beware of bears, he saw to the preparations for the night.  They returned shortly with their hats filled and their lips stained; then, much to his disgust, they insisted upon straightening out his tent with their own hands.  Once inside its low shelter, they gleefully sifted sand between his blankets and replaced his pillow with a rock; then they induced the cook to coil a wet string in his flapjack.  When supper was over and the camp-fires of driftwood were crackling merrily, they fixed themselves comfortably where their feet would toast, and made him tell them stories until his eyes drooped with weariness.

It was late summer, and O’Neil had expected to find the glaciers less active than usual, but heavy rains in the interior and hot thawing weather along the coast had swelled the Salmon until many bergs clogged it, while the reverberations which rolled down the valley told him that both Garfield and Jackson were caving badly.  It was not the safest time at which to approach the place, he reflected, but the girls had shown themselves nimble of foot, and he put aside his uneasiness.

Short though the miles had been and easy as the trip had proved, Eliza soon found herself wondering that it should be possible to penetrate this region at all.  The snarling river, the charging icebergs, the caving banks, and the growing menace of that noisy gap ahead began to have their effect upon her and Natalie; and when the party finally rounded the point where Murray and Dan had caught their first glimpse of the lower glacier they paused with exclamations of amazement.  They stood at the upper end of a gorge between low bluffs, and just across the hurrying flood lay the lower limit of the giant ice-field.  The edge, perhaps six hundred feet distant, was sloping and mud-stained, for in its slow advance it had plowed a huge furrow, lifting boulders, trees, acres of soil upon its back.  The very bluff through which the river had cut its bed was formed of the debris it had thrown off, and constituted a bulwark protecting its flank.  Farther up-stream the slope, became steeper, then changed to a rugged perpendicular face showing marks of recent cleavage.  This palisade extended