Smoke Bellew

Smoke grinned, stepped to the fake windlass, and gave it a couple of creaking turns. Shorty pulled out the moss-chinking from between the logs so as to make peep-holes on every side of the cabin. Then he blew out the candle.

“Now,” he whispered at the end of half an hour.

Smoke turned the windlass slowly, paused after several minutes, caught up a galvanized bucket filled with earth and struck it with slide and scrape and grind against the heap of rocks they had hauled in. Then he lighted a cigarette, shielding the flame of the match in his hands.

“They’s three of ‘em,” Shorty whispered. “You oughta saw ‘em. Say, when you made that bucket-dump noise they was fair quiverin’. They’s one at the window now tryin’ to peek in.”

Smoke glowed his cigarette, and glanced at his watch.

“We’ve got to do this thing regularly,” he breathed. “We’ll haul up a bucket every fifteen minutes. And in the meantime – ”

Through triple thicknesses of sacking, he struck a cold-chisel on the face of a rock.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” Shorty moaned with delight. He crept over noiselessly from the peep-hole. “They’ve got their heads together, an’ I can almost see ‘em talkin’.”

And from then until four in the morning, at fifteen-minute intervals, the seeming of a bucket was hoisted on the windlass that creaked and ran around on itself and hoisted nothing. Then their visitors departed, and Smoke and Shorty went to bed.

After daylight, Shorty examined the moccasin-marks. “Big Bill Saltman was one of them,” he concluded. “Look at the size of it.”

Smoke looked out over the river. “Get ready for visitors. There are two crossing the ice now.”

“Huh! Wait till Breck files that string of claims at nine o’clock. There’ll be two thousand crossing over.”

“And every mother’s son of them yammering ‘mother-lode,’” Smoke laughed. “‘The source of the Klondike placers found at last.’”

Shorty, who had clambered to the top of a steep shoulder of rock, gazed with the eye of a connoisseur at the strip they had staked.

“It sure looks like a true fissure vein,” he said. “A expert could almost trace the lines of it under the snow. It’d fool anybody. The slide fills the front of it an’ see them outcrops? Look like the real thing, only they ain’t.”

When the two men, crossing the river, climbed the zigzag trail up the slide, they found a closed cabin. Bill Saltman, who led the way, went softly to the door, listened, then beckoned Wild Water Charley up to him. From inside came the creak and whine of a windlass bearing a heavy load. They waited at the final pause, then heard the lower-away and the impact of a bucket on rock. Four times, in the next hour, they heard the thing repeated. Then Wild Water knocked on the door. From inside came low furtive noises, then silences, and more furtive noises, and at the end of five minutes Smoke, breathing heavily, opened the door an inch and peered out. They saw on his face and shirt powdered rock-fragments. His greeting was suspiciously genial.

“Wait a minute,” he added, “and I’ll be with you.”

Pulling on his mittens, he slipped through the door and confronted the visitors outside in the snow. Their quick eyes noted his shirt, across the shoulders, discolored and powdery, and the knees of his overalls that showed signs of dirt brushed hastily but not quite thoroughly away.

“Rather early for a call,” he observed. “What brings you across the river? Going hunting?”

“We’re on, Smoke,” Wild Water said confidentially. “An’ you’d just as well come through. You’ve got something here.”

“If you’re looking for eggs – ” Smoke began.

“Aw, forget it. We mean business.”

“You mean you want to buy lots, eh?” Smoke rattled on swiftly. “There’s some dandy building sites here. But, you see, we can’t sell yet. We haven’t had the town surveyed. Come around next week, Wild Water, and for peace and quietness, I’ll show you something swell, if you’re anxious to live over here. Next week, sure, it will be surveyed. Good-by. Sorry I can’t ask you inside, but Shorty – well, you know him. He’s peculiar. He says he came over for peace and quietness, and he’s asleep now. I wouldn’t wake him for the world.”

As Smoke talked he shook their hands warmly in farewell. Still talking and shaking their hands, he stepped inside and closed the door.

They looked at each other and nodded significantly.

“See the knees of his pants?” Saltman whispered hoarsely.

“Sure. An’ his shoulders. He’s been bumpin’ an’ crawlin’ around in a shaft.” As Wild Water talked, his eyes wandered up the snow-covered ravine until they were halted by something that brought a whistle to his lips. “Just cast your eyes up there, Bill. See where I’m pointing? If that ain’t a prospect-hole! An’ follow it out to both sides – you can see where they tramped in the snow. If it ain’t rim-rock on both sides I don’t know what rim-rock is. It’s a fissure vein, all right.”

“An’ look at the size of it!” Saltman cried. “They’ve got something here, you bet.”

“An’ run your eyes down the slide there – see them bluffs standin’ out an’ slopin’ in. The whole slide’s in the mouth of the vein as well.”

“And just keep a-lookin’ on, out on the ice there, on the trail,” Saltman directed. “Looks like most of Dawson, don’t it?”

Wild Water took one glance and saw the trail black with men clear to the far Dawson bank, down which the same unbroken string of men was pouring.

“Well, I’m goin’ to get a look-in at that prospect-hole before they get here,” he said, turning and starting swiftly up the ravine.

But the cabin door opened, and the two occupants stepped out.

“Hey!” Smoke called. “Where are you going?”

“To pick out a lot,” Wild Water called back. “Look at the river. All Dawson’s stampeding to buy lots, an’ we’re going to beat ‘em to it for the choice. That’s right, ain’t it, Bill?”

“Sure thing,” Saltman corroborated. “This has the makin’s of a Jim-dandy suburb, an’ it sure looks like it’ll be some popular.”

“Well, we’re not selling lots over in that section where you’re heading,” Smoke answered. “Over to the right there, and back on top of the bluffs are the lots. This section, running from the river and over the tops, is reserved. So come on back.”

“That’s the spot we’ve gone and selected,” Saltman argued.

“But there’s nothing doing, I tell you,” Smoke said sharply.

“Any objections to our strolling, then?” Saltman persisted.

“Decidedly. Your strolling is getting monotonous. Come on back out of that.”

“I just reckon we’ll stroll anyways,” Saltman replied stubbornly. “Come on, Wild Water.”

“I warn you, you are trespassing,” was Smoke’s final word.

“Nope, just strollin’,” Saltman gaily retorted, turning his back and starting on.

“Hey! Stop in your tracks, Bill, or I’ll sure bore you!” Shorty thundered, drawing and leveling two Colt’s forty-fours. “Step another step in your steps an’ I let eleven holes through your danged ornery carcass. Get that?”

Saltman stopped, perplexed.

“He sure got me,” Shorty mumbled to Smoke. “But if he goes on I’m up against it hard. I can’t shoot. What’ll I do?”

“Look here, Shorty, listen to reason,” Saltman begged.

“Come here to me an’ we’ll talk reason,” was Shorty’s retort.

And they were still talking reason when the head of the stampede emerged from the zigzag trail and came upon them.