“Humph!  Then I s’pose he’s got a job for life,” said Tom, morosely.  “You make friends and enemies quicker than anybody I ever saw.  You’ve got Curtis Gordon on your neck now.”

“On account of this boy?  Nonsense!”

“Not altogether.  Denny is Gordon’s right bower.  I think he calls him his secretary; anyhow, he does Gordon’s dirty work and they’re thicker than fleas.  First you come along and steal me, underhanded, then you grab his pet engineer before he has a chance to hire him back again.  Just to top off the evening you publicly brand his confidential understrapper as a card cheat and thump him on the medulla oblongata—­”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the duodenum?”

“Well, you hit him in a vital spot, and Gordon won’t forget it.”

Late on the following morning O’Neil’s expedition was landed at the deserted fishing-station of Omar, thirty miles down the sound from Cortez.  From this point its route lay down the bay to open water and thence eastward along the coast in front of the Salmon River delta some forty miles to Kyak.  This latter stretch would have been well-nigh impossible for open boats but for the fact that the numerous mud bars and islands thrown out by the river afforded a sheltered course.  These inside channels, though shallow, were of sufficient depth to allow small craft to navigate and had long been used as a route to the coal-fields.

Appleton, smiling and cheerful, was the first member of the party to appear at the dock that morning, and when the landing had been effected at Omar he showed his knowledge of the country by suggesting a short cut which would save the long row down to the mouth of the sound and around into the delta.  Immediately back of the old cannery, which occupied a gap in the mountain rim, lay a narrow lake, and this, he declared, held an outlet which led into the Salmon River flats.  By hauling the boats over into this body of water—­a task made easy by the presence of a tiny tramway with one dilapidated push-car which had been a part of the cannery equipment—­it would be possible to save much time and labor.

“I’ve heard there was a way through,” O’Neil confessed, “but nobody seemed to know just where it was.”

“I know,” the young man assured him.  “We can gain a day at least, and I judge every day is valuable.”

“So valuable that we can’t afford to lose one by making a mistake,” said his employer, meaningly.

“Leave it to me.  I never forget a country once I’ve been through it.”

Accordingly the boats were loaded upon the hand-car and transferred one at a time.  In the interval O’Neil examined his surroundings casually.  He was surprised to find the dock and buildings in excellent condition, notwithstanding the fact that the station had lain idle for several years.  A solitary Norwegian, with but a slight suspicion of English, was watching the premises and managed to make known his impression that poor fishing had led the owners to abandon operations at this point.  He, too, had heard that Omar Lake had an outlet into the delta, but he was not sure of its existence; he was sure of nothing, in fact except that it was very lonesome here, and that he had run out of tobacco five days before.