356 
HARD SERVICE FOR BOATS. 
companicd them along the beach to meet a boat that wag 
coming up -with the tide to take ns on board. 
We soon reached her, when our native friends bade us 
flxrewell, with the promise to visit us on. board and to 
bring with them one of their famous elk, the quality of 
whose meat we were anxious to compare with our usual 
diet of ^‘salt junk” and sour bread. It is useless, I sup- 
pose, to repeat “the old story:” — how they got their iron 
pot stuck full of plugs of tobacco, how we continued to 
luxuriate upon salt junk and sour bread, and how the elk 
continued his leaps from crag to crag to the imminent 
terror of imaginary beholders. 
The day following this ramble, Lawton reported a suffi- 
cient quantity of coal as being ready for embarkatioii, 
and “all hands” and boats were consequently devoted to 
that work. We soon found it to be any thing but a 
pleasant job, however; for, having to carry the boats to 
the very foot of the coal-stratum in order to fill them, and 
then to pull back over the mud-flat to deep water, the 
ebb-tide often got the start of us, and left us sprinkled 
about over said flat, sometimes with fall boats, sometimes 
with empty ones, and always with the pleasant alternative 
of remaining in the boats to bo half frozen, or of walk- 
ing through the cold mud to the distant fire. Moreover, 
there was all this time lost, besides straining the boats if 
they happened to be loaded when thus left “high and 
dry;” and our boats were valuable in that out-of-the-way 
part of the world, more particularly as every day that 
passed only served to strengthen our minds in the con- 
viction that the “ old John” herself was destined to play 
us a trick before we could get her safely into San Fran- 
