Smoke Bellew

“Same here,” the other agreed. “I’d headed back and was expecting to fetch the Stewart last night, when out I popped in sight of the lake. If that’s it, where’s the Stewart? And where have I been all the time? And how did you come here? And what’s your name?”

“Bellew. Kit Bellew.”

“Oh! I know you.” The man’s eyes and face were bright with a joyous smile, and his hand flashed eagerly out to Smoke’s. “I’ve heard all about you.”

“Been reading police-court news, I see,” Smoke sparred modestly.

“Nope.” The man laughed and shook his head. “Merely recent Klondike history. I might have recognized you if you’d been shaved. I watched you putting it all over the gambling crowd when you were bucking roulette in the Elkhorn. My name’s Carson – Andy Carson; and I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to meet up with you.”

He was a slender man, wiry with health, with quick black eyes and a magnetism of camaraderie.

“And this is Surprise Lake?” he murmured incredulously.

“It certainly is.”

“And its bottom’s buttered with gold?”

“Sure. There’s some of the churning.” Smoke dipped in his overalls pocket and brought forth half a dozen nuggets. “That’s the stuff. All you have to do is go down to bottom, blind if you want to, and pick up a handful. Then you’ve got to run half a mile to get up your circulation.”

“Well, gosh-dash my dingbats, if you haven’t beaten me to it,” Carson swore whimsically, but his disappointment was patent. “An’ I thought I’d scooped the whole caboodle. Anyway, I’ve had the fun of getting here.”

“Fun!” Smoke cried. “Why, if we can ever get our hands on all that bottom, we’ll make Rockefeller look like thirty cents.”

“But it’s yours,” was Carson’s objection.

“Nothing to it, my friend. You’ve got to realize that no gold deposit like it has been discovered in all the history of mining. It will take you and me and my partner and all the friends we’ve got to lay our hands on it. All Bonanza and Eldorado, dumped together, wouldn’t be richer than half an acre down here. The problem is to drain the lake. It will take millions. And there’s only one thing I’m afraid of. There’s so much of it that if we fail to control the output it will bring about the demonetization of gold.”

“And you tell me – ” Carson broke off, speechless and amazed.

“And glad to have you. It will take a year or two, with all the money we can raise, to drain the lake. It can be done. I’ve looked over the ground. But it will take every man in the country that’s willing to work for wages. We’ll need an army, and we need right now decent men in on the ground floor. Are you in?”

“Am I in? Don’t I look it? I feel so much like a millionaire that I’m real timid about crossing that big glacier. Couldn’t afford to break my neck now. Wish I had some more of those hob-spikes. I was just hammering the last in when you came along. How’s yours? Let’s see.”

Smoke held up his foot.

“Worn smooth as a skating-rink!” Carson cried. “You’ve certainly been hiking some. Wait a minute, and I’ll pull some of mine out for you.”

But Smoke refused to listen. “Besides,” he said, “I’ve got about forty feet of rope cached where we take the ice. My partner and I used it coming over. It will be a cinch.”

It was a hard, hot climb. The sun blazed dazzlingly on the ice-surface, and with streaming pores they panted from the exertion. There were places, criss-crossed by countless fissures and crevasses, where an hour of dangerous toil advanced them no more than a hundred yards. At two in the afternoon, beside a pool of water bedded in the ice, Smoke called a halt.

“Let’s tackle some of that jerky,” he said. “I’ve been on short allowance, and my knees are shaking. Besides, we’re across the worst. Three hundred yards will fetch us to the rocks, and it’s easy going, except for a couple of nasty fissures and one bad one that heads us down toward the bulge. There’s a weak ice-bridge there, but Shorty and I managed it.”

Over the jerky, the two men got acquainted, and Andy Carson unbosomed himself of the story of his life. “I just knew I’d find Surprise Lake,” he mumbled in the midst of mouthfuls. “I had to. I missed the French Hill Benches, the Big Skookum, and Monte Cristo, and then it was Surprise Lake or bust. And here I am. My wife knew I’d strike it. I’ve got faith enough, but hers knocks mine galleywest. She’s a corker, a crackerjack – dead game, grit to her finger-ends, never-say-die, a fighter from the drop of the hat, the one woman for me, true blue and all the rest. Take a look at that.”

He sprung open his watch, and on the inside cover Smoke saw the small, pasted photograph of a bright-haired woman, framed on either side by the laughing face of a child.

“Boys?” he queried.

“Boy and girl,” Carson answered proudly. “He’s a year and a half older.” He sighed. “They might have been some grown, but we had to wait. You see, she was sick. Lungs. But she put up a fight. What’d we know about such stuff? I was clerking, railroad clerk, Chicago, when we got married. Her folks were tuberculous. Doctors didn’t know much in those days. They said it was hereditary. All her family had it. Caught it from each other, only they never guessed it. Thought they were born with it. Fate. She and I lived with them the first couple of years. I wasn’t afraid. No tuberculosis in my family. And I got it. That set me thinking. It was contagious. I caught it from breathing their air.

“We talked it over, she and I. Then I jumped the family doctor and consulted an up-to-date expert. He told me what I’d figured out for myself, and said Arizona was the place for us. We pulled up stakes and went down – no money, nothing. I got a job sheep-herding, and left her in town – a lung town. It was filled to spilling with lungers.

“Of course, living and sleeping in the clean open, I started right in to mend. I was away months at a time. Every time I came back, she was worse. She just couldn’t pick up. But we were learning. I jerked her out of that town, and she went to sheep-herding with me. In four years, winter and summer, cold and heat, rain, snow, and frost, and all the rest, we never slept under a roof, and we were moving camp all the time. You ought to have seen the change – brown as berries, lean as Indians, tough as rawhide. When we figured we were cured, we pulled out for San Francisco. But we were too previous. By the second month we both had slight hemorrhages. We flew the coop back to Arizona and the sheep. Two years more of it. That fixed us. Perfect cure. All her family’s dead. Wouldn’t listen to us.

“Then we jumped cities for keeps. Knocked around on the Pacific coast and southern Oregon looked good to us. We settled in the Rogue River Valley – apples. There’s a big future there, only nobody knows it. I got my land – on time, of course – for forty an acre. Ten years from now it’ll be worth five hundred.

“We’ve done some almighty hustling. Takes money, and we hadn’t a cent to start with, you know – had to build a house and barn, get horses and plows, and all the rest. She taught school two years. Then the boy came. But we’ve got it. You ought to see those trees we planted – a hundred acres of them, almost mature now. But it’s all been outgo, and the mortgage working overtime. That’s why I’m here. She’d ‘a’ come along only for the kids and the trees. She’s handlin’ that end, and here I am, a gosh-danged expensive millionaire – in prospect.”

He looked happily across the sun-dazzle on the ice to the green water of the lake along the farther shore, took a final look at the photograph, and murmured:

“She’s some woman, that. She’s hung on. She just wouldn’t die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she’s thin now. Never will be fat. But it’s the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris. I don’t think much of that burg, but she’s just hankered for it all her life.”

“Well, here’s the gold that will take you to Paris,” Smoke assured him. “All we’ve got to do is to get our hands on it.”

Carson nodded with glistening eyes. “Say – that farm of ours is the prettiest piece of orchard land on all the Pacific coast. Good climate, too. Our lungs will never get touched again there. Ex-lungers have to be almighty careful, you know. If you’re thinking of settling, well, just take a peep in at our valley before you settle, that’s all. And fishing! Say! – did you ever get a thirty-five-pound salmon on a six-ounce rod? Some fight, bo’, some fight!”

“I’m lighter than you by forty pounds,” Carson said. “Let me go first.”

They stood on the edge of the crevasse. It was enormous and ancient, fully a hundred feet across, with sloping, age-eaten sides instead of sharp-angled rims. At this one place it was bridged by a huge mass of pressure-hardened snow that was itself half ice. Even the bottom of this mass they could not see, much less the bottom of the crevasse. Crumbling and melting, the bridge threatened imminent collapse. There were signs where recent portions had broken away, and even as they studied it a mass of half a ton dislodged and fell.

“Looks pretty bad,” Carson admitted with an ominous head-shake. “And it looks much worse than if I wasn’t a millionaire.”

“But we’ve got to tackle it,” Smoke said. “We’re almost across. We can’t go back. We can’t camp here on the ice all night. And there’s no other way. Shorty and I explored for a mile up. It was in better shape, though, when we crossed.”

“It’s one at a time, and me first.” Carson took the part coil of rope from Smoke’s hand. “You’ll have to cast off. I’ll take the rope and the pick. Gimme your hand so I can slip down easy.”

Slowly and carefully he lowered himself the several feet to the bridge, where he stood, making final adjustments for the perilous traverse. On his back was his pack outfit. Around his neck, resting on his shoulders, he coiled the rope, one end of which was still fast to his waist.

“I’d give a mighty good part of my millions right now for a bridge-construction gang,” he said, but his cheery, whimsical smile belied the words. Also, he added, “It’s all right; I’m a cat.”

The pick, and the long stick he used as an alpenstock, he balanced horizontally after the manner of a rope-walker. He thrust one foot forward tentatively, drew it back, and steeled himself with a visible, physical effort.

“I wish I was flat broke,” he smiled up. “If ever I get out of being a millionaire this time, I’ll never be one again. It’s too uncomfortable.”

“It’s all right,” Smoke encouraged. “I’ve been over it before. Better let me try it first.”

“And you forty pounds to the worse,” the little man flashed back. “I’ll be all right in a minute. I’m all right now.” And this time the nerving-up process was instantaneous. “Well, here goes for Rogue River and the apples,” he said, as his foot went out, this time to rest carefully and lightly while the other foot was brought up and past. Very gently and circumspectly he continued on his way until two-thirds of the distance was covered. Here he stopped to examine a depression he must cross, at the bottom of which was a fresh crack. Smoke, watching, saw him glance to the side and down into the crevasse itself, and then begin a slight swaying.

“Keep your eyes up!” Smoke commanded sharply. “Now! Go on!”

The little man obeyed, nor faltered on the rest of the journey. The sun-eroded slope of the farther edge of the crevasse was slippery, but not steep, and he worked his way up to a narrow ledge, faced about, and sat down.

“Your turn,” he called across. “But just keep a-coming and don’t look down. That’s what got my goat. Just keep a-coming, that’s all. And get a move on. It’s almighty rotten.”

Balancing his own stick horizontally, Smoke essayed the passage. That the bridge was on its last legs was patent. He felt a jar under foot, a slight movement of the mass, and a heavier jar. This was followed by a single sharp crackle. Behind him he knew something was happening. If for no other reason, he knew it by the strained, tense face of Carson. From beneath, thin and faint, came the murmur of running water, and Smoke’s eyes involuntarily wavered to a glimpse of the shimmering depths. He jerked them back to the way before him. Two-thirds over, he came to the depression. The sharp edges of the crack, but slightly touched by the sun, showed how recent it was. His foot was lifted to make the step across, when the crack began slowly widening, at the same time emitting numerous sharp snaps. He made the step quickly, increasing the stride of it, but the worn nails of his shoe skated on the farther slope of the depression. He fell on his face, and without pause slipped down and into the crack, his legs hanging clear, his chest supported by the stick which he had managed to twist crosswise as he fell.

His first sensation was the nausea caused by the sickening up-leap of his pulse; his first idea was of surprise that he had fallen no farther. Behind him was crackling and jar and movement to which the stick vibrated. From beneath, in the heart of the glacier, came the soft and hollow thunder of the dislodged masses striking bottom. And still the bridge, broken from its farthest support and ruptured in the middle, held, though the portion he had crossed tilted downward at a pitch of twenty degrees. He could see Carson, perched on his ledge, his feet braced against the melting surface, swiftly recoiling the rope from his shoulders to his hand.