The Little Man
"I wisht you wasn't so set in your ways," Shorty demurred. "I'm sure
scairt of that glacier. No man ought to tackle it by his lonely."
Smoke laughed cheerfully, and ran his eye up the glistening face of
the tiny glacier that filled the head of the valley. "Here it is
August already, and the days have been getting shorter for two
months," he epitomized the situation. "You know quartz, and I don't. But I can bring up the grub, while you keep after that mother lode. So-long. I'll be back by to-morrow evening."
He turned and started.
"I got a hunch something's goin' to happen," Shorty pleaded after him.
But Smoke's reply was a bantering laugh. He held on down the little
valley, occasionally wiping the sweat from his forehead, the while his
feet crushed through ripe mountain raspberries and delicate ferns that
grew beside patches of sun-sheltered ice.
In the early spring he and Shorty had come up the Stewart River and
launched out into the amazing chaos of the region where Surprise Lake
lay. And all of the spring and half of the summer had been consumed
in futile wanderings, when, on the verge of turning back, they caught
their first glimpse of the baffling, gold-bottomed sheet of water
which had lured and fooled a generation of miners. Making their camp
in the old cabin which Smoke had discovered on his previous visit, they had learned three things: first, heavy nugget gold was carpeted thickly on the lake bottom; next, the gold could be dived for in the shallower portions, but the temperature of the water was man-killing; and, finally, the draining of the lake was too stupendous a task for two men in the shorter half of a short summer. Undeterred, reasoning from the coarseness of the gold that it had not traveled far, they had set out in search of the mother lode. They had crossed the big glacier that frowned on the southern rim and devoted themselves to the puzzling maze of small valleys and canyons beyond, which, by most unmountainlike methods, drained, or had at one time drained, into the lake.
The valley Smoke was descending gradually widened after the fashion of
any normal valley; but, at the lower end, it pinched narrowly between
high precipitous walls and abruptly stopped in a cross wall. At the
base of this, in a welter of broken rock, the streamlet disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its shallowness. It was this shallowness that made its draining feasible. All about arose jumbled mountains, with ice-scarred peaks and crags, grotesquely shaped and grouped. All was topsyturvy and unsystematic--a Dore nightmare. So fantastic and impossible was it that it affected Smoke as more like a cosmic landscape-joke than a rational portion of earth's surface. There were many glaciers in the canyons, most of them tiny, and, as he looked, one of the larger ones, on the north shore, calved amid thunders and splashings. Across the lake, seemingly not more than half a mile, but, as he well knew, five miles away, he could see the bunch of spruce-trees and the cabin. He looked again to make sure, and saw smoke clearly rising from the chimney. Somebody else had surprised themselves into finding Surprise Lake, was his conclusion, as he turned to climb the southern wall.
From the top of this he came down into a little valley, flower-floored
and lazy with the hum of bees, that behaved quite as a reasonable
valley should, in so far as it made legitimate entry on the lake. What was wrong with it was its length--scarcely a hundred yards; its head a straight up-and-down cliff of a thousand feet, over which a stream pitched itself in descending veils of mist.
And here he encountered more smoke, floating lazily upward in the warm
sunshine beyond an outjut of rock. As he came around the corner he
heard a light, metallic tap-tapping and a merry whistling that kept
the beat. Then he saw the man, an upturned shoe between his knees, into the sole of which he was driving hob-spikes.
"Hello!" was the stranger's greeting, and Smoke's heart went out to
the man in ready liking. "Just in time for a snack. There's coffee
in the pot, a couple of cold flapjacks, and some jerky."
"I'll go you if I lose," was Smoke's acceptance, as he sat down. "I've been rather skimped on the last several meals, but there's oodles of grub over in the cabin."