Ten minutes sufficed to knock off the crate and set the boat up on the floor of the blacksmith shop. It consisted of a bow and a stern section, each about seven feet in length and provided with a thwart and a water-tight compartment. Indeed, each section was really a complete boat in itself, awkward in shape, to be sure, yet something that would float on an even keel and which could be propelled by oars or paddles. Bolting these two sections together produced a fourteen-foot skiff of astonishingly good lines. The sides, it is true, were inches lower than I would liked to have had them, but there was something distinctly heartening in the fine flare of the bows and the pronounced sheer of the little craft. Heartening, also, was the comment of the helper working to patch up a gunwale smashed in transit. He said it was the darndest hard tin he ever tried to put a drill through. Equally reassuring was the blacksmith's complaint over the trouble he was having in hammering out a number of little dents. I may as well add here that that transit-crushed gunwale was the worst scar my pretty tin toy was to show when I docked it finally in St. Louis after bumping something like 2500 miles down the Yellowstone and Missouri. The bright little shallop looked so inherently water-worthy that I dragged it down to the river and jumped in without further misgivings. Its lightness was highly refreshing, especially when I remembered the back-breaking job it had been dragging for only a few feet the wooden skiff I had used on the lower Columbia. Built to be pulled from the forward section, carrying its load aft, it was down heavily by the head until I trimmed ship by taking in the blacksmith. My own sodden two hundred and forty pounds still brought it a bit too low by the bows, but I readily saw how the weight of my outfit and ballast would correct this until I shipped my outboard motor at Bismarck. The trial was eminently satisfactory. I dodged back and forth across the current, ran a short riffle, and then swung round and pulled right back up through it. Some water was shipped, but not enough to bother. There would be no dearth of dampness in the real rapids, I could see; but those air-chambers should float her through in one way or another, and water was easily dumped at the first eddy. When, on pulling up to the bank to land, I tossed the painter to some one waiting below the blacksmith shop, I acknowledged the proper sex of the little craft for the first time. "Catch the line and ease her in!" was what I said, or something to that effect. That meant she had convinced me that she was a regular fellow--that I was quite game to trust myself out alone with her day or night. And that is just what I did, and for something like sixty or seventy days and nights. Saucy and spirited, and at times wilful, as she proved to be, that confidence was never betrayed.