Of course, these fish were kept in order that eggs might be secured by millions, and placed in the jars to hatch out.
The boys early made the acquaintance of some stalwart, dark-featured fellows who had long canoes over twenty feet in length in which for half a dollar each, two of them would take a party of four or six down the whirling rapids.
And of course the boys quickly took that trip. The guides who piloted them claimed to be the grandsons of old John Boucher the Indian whom tens of thousands of tourists knew as the most daring and skilful guide of all the canoe men at the Soo. Old John some years ago took another pilot aboard, and started on the longest voyage he ever undertook. But from what he told the writer, just two years before he lay down in his last sleep, with the familiar roar of the Soo Rapids sounding in his ears, the way was fully charted and buoyed to him, and he had the utmost confidence in his pilot.
In sweeping down the rapids where the outlet of Lake Superior drops nineteen feet in the mile, the boys noticed the terrible gaping whirlpool over to the left. They saw their guides avoided it sharply, and upon questioning later as to why this was done learned that only one man had dared to always pilot his canoe close to the edge of that seething vortex, to be sucked into which meant death.
“Since Old John is gone, no guide cares to take chances,” was the reply.
Of course, the boys also hunted up the grandmother of little Sallie. They found her living in comfort, with a son who had some office connected with the electrical department of the great locks.
The old lady was shocked when she learned what kind of a man Crawley really was. She declared that if the girl came back again as usual after a summer with her father she should never go out into the pine woods again.
Some months later Teddy, who had left his address with the old lady, received a letter from her that really eased his mind greatly, as it did also those of Dolph and Amos, when they came to hear about it.
Sallie was home again, sad, but fully satisfied that she had carried out the last injunction of her mother to stick to her father to the end.
Crawley was no more. He had been killed by a stroke of lightning, and the girl rendered unconscious at the same time. Recovering, little Sallie had made her way to the camp of a party of Chicago people, whom she knew were on the other side of the small lake.