Sticking to my oar I came up quickly and went bobbing down the undulating stream of the rapid, kissing off a rock now and then but never with sharp impact. I had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the lightened boat broke loose above and started to follow me. Right down the middle of the riffle she came, wallowing mightily but shipping very little additional water. Holding my oar under one arm and paddling lightly against the current with my other, I waited till the _Mule_ floundered abreast of me and clambered aboard. She was about a third full of water, but as the weight of it hardly compensated for the rocks dumped overboard she was riding considerably higher than before, though much less steadily. [Illustration: "YANKEE JIM" WITH A TROUT FROM HIS CANYON] [Illustration: JUST ABOVE THE FIRST DROP IN "YANKEE JIM'S" CANYON] Looking back up-stream as the reeling _Mule_ swung in the current, I saw Jim, with the Gingham Girl in his wake, ambling down the bank at a broken-kneed trot in an apparent endeavour to head me to the next fall as per schedule. Poor old chap! He was never a hundred-to-one shot in that race now that the _Mule_ had regained her head and was running away down mid-channel regardless of obstacles. He stumbled and went down even as I watched him with the tail of my eye. The Gingham Girl pulled him to his feet and he seemed to be leaning heavily against her fine shoulder as the _Mule_ whisked me out of sight around the next bend. That was the last I ever saw of either of them. Jim, I understand, died some years ago, and the Gingham Girl.... Dear me, she must be forty herself by now and the mother of not less than eight. Even ten is considered a conservative family up that way. They are not race suicidists on the upper Yellowstone. With the steering oar permanently unshipped there was more difficulty than ever in exercising any control over the balkiness of the stubborn _Mule_. After a few ineffectual attempts I gave up trying to do anything with the oar and confined my navigation to fending off with a cottonwood pike-pole. This really helped no more than the oar, so it was rather by good luck than anything else that the _Mule_ hit the next pitch head-on and galloped down it with considerable smartness. When she reeled through another rapid beam-on without shipping more than a bucket or two of green water I concluded she was quite able to take care of herself, and so sat down to enjoy the scenery. I was still lounging at ease when we came to a sharp right-angling notch of a bend where the full force of the current was exerted to push a sheer wall of red-brown cliff out of the way. Not unnaturally, the _Mule_ tried to do the same thing. That was where I discovered I had over-rated her strength of construction.