Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank, covering every foot of space, and still the needle hung steadfastly to its place. They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from shore when Bruce cried sharply: "Hold her steady! Wait!" The needle wavered--agitated unmistakably--then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North. Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke---- "John, we've GOT her!" "I _see_ her!" Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft. "Lookee," he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, "see her there--like a shadow--her bow is shoved up four--five feet above her stern. Got her?" Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys. "The water'll drop a foot yet," Bruce said excitedly. "Can you dive?" "First cousin to a musk-rat," the Swede declared. "We'll build a raft like a hollow square, use a tripod and bring up the chain blocks. What we can't raise with a grappling-hook, we'll go after. John, we're going to get it--every piece!" "Bet yer life we'll get her!" John cried responsively, "if I has to git drunk to do it and stand to my neck in water for a week." XXI TOY Bruce paused in the blithesome task of packing six by eights to look at the machinery which lay like a pile of junk on the river bank. Each time he passed he looked at it and always he felt the same hot impatience and burning sense of irritation. The days, the weeks, months were going by and nothing moved. Two months Jennings had named as the maximum of time required to set up the machines and have the plant in working order. "We'll be throwin' dirt by the middle of July," he had said, confidently, and it was now close to the middle of September. The lost machinery was no longer an excuse, as every piece had been recovered by grappling and diving, and landed safely at the diggin's. Twice the whole crew save Jennings had dragged a heavy barge fifteen miles up the river, advancing only a pull at a time against the strong current, windlassing over the rapids with big John Johnson poling like mad to keep the boat off the rocks; sleeping at night in wet clothing, waking stiff and jaded as stage horses to go at it again. Six days they had been getting up, and a little over an hour coming down, while two trips had been necessary owing to the low stage of the water, which now made the running of a deeply loaded boat impossible. It had been a severe test of endurance and loyalty in which none had fallen short and no one among them had worked with more tireless energy than Smaltz, or his erstwhile friend but present enemy, Porcupine Jim.