Whether the sign of the black bottle wheeled into the ascendant according to calendar reckoning during the three weeks of my absence I never learned. Certainly there was no sign of it either above or below the horizon on my return. Jim was more benevolent than ever, and also (so he assured me almost at once) in direct communication with his "little friends up thar." He tried hard to dissuade me from tackling the river, urging that a fine upstanding young feller like myself ought to spend his life doing good to others rather than going outer his way to do harm to hisself. I chaffed him into relinquishing that line by asking him if he was afraid I was going to bump the edges off some of his canyon scenery. Finally he consented to take me up-river to where an abandoned boat he had discovered was located, but only on condition I should try to get another man to help me run the Canyon. He said he would give what help he could from the bank, but didn't care to expose his old bones to the chance of a wetting. He thought "Buckskin Jim" Cutler, who owned a ranch nearby, might be willing to go with me as far as Livingston. He was not sure that Cutler had run the Canyon, but in any event he knew it foot by foot, and would be of great help in letting the boat down with ropes at the bad places. We found the craft we sought about a mile up-stream, where it had been abandoned at the edge of an eddy at the last high-water. It was high and dry on the rocks, and the now rapidly rising river had some ten or twelve feet to go before reaching the careened hull. Plain as it was that neither boat-builder nor even carpenter had had a hand in its construction, there was still no possible doubt of its tremendous strength and capacity to withstand punishment. Jim was under the impression that the timbers and planking from a wrecked bridge had been drawn upon in building it. That boat reminded me of the pictures in my school history of the _Merrimac_, and later, on my first visit to the Nile, the massive Temple of Karnak reminded me of that boat. Jim said that a homesick miner at Aldridge had built this fearful and wonderful craft with the idea of using it to return to his family in Hickman, Kentucky. He had bade defiance to the rapids of the Yellowstone with the slogan "HICKMAN OR BUST." The letters were still discernible in tarry basrelief. So also the name on bow and stern. (Or was it stern and bow? I was never quite sure which was which.) _Kentucky Mule_ he had called it, but I never knew why till years later. And sorry I was I ever learned, too.