“You’ve been up there?”

“No.  But everybody says so, and I’ve seen glacier ice clear out here in the delta.  They’re always moving, too—­the glaciers themselves—­and they’re filled with crevasses, so that it’s dangerous to cross them on foot even if one keeps back from the river.”

“How did those men get their outfits through in ’98?” O’Neil queried.

“I’m blessed if I know—­maybe they flew.”  After a moment Dan added, “Perhaps they dodged the pieces as they fell.”

O’Neil smiled.  He opened his lips to speak, then closed them, and for a long time kept his eyes fixed speculatively in the direction of the canyon.  When he had first spoken of a route from Omar he had thrown out the suggestion with only a casual interest.  Now, suddenly, the idea took strong possession of his mind; it fascinated him with its daring, its bigness.  He had begun to dream.

The world owes all great achievements to dreamers, for men who lack vivid imaginations are incapable of conceiving big enterprises.  No matter how practical the thing accomplished, it requires this faculty, no less than a poem or a picture.  Every bridge, every skyscraper, every mechanical invention, every great work which man has wrought in steel and stone and concrete, was once a dream.

O’Neil had no small measure of the imaginative power that makes great leaders, great inventors, great builders.  He was capable of tremendous enthusiasm; his temperament forever led him to dare what others feared to undertake.  And here he glimpsed a tremendous opportunity.  The traffic of a budding nation was waiting to be seized.  To him who gained control of Alaskan transportation would come the domination of her resources.  Many were striving for the prize, but if there should prove to be a means of threading that Salmon River canon with steel rails, the man who first found it would have those other railroad enterprises at his mercy.  The Trust would have to sue for terms or abandon further effort; for this route was shorter, it was level, it was infinitely cheaper to improve.  The stakes in the game were staggering.  The mere thought of them made his heart leap.  The only obstacle, of course, lay in those glaciers, and he began to wonder if they could not be made to open.  Why not?  No one knew positively that they were impregnable, for no one knew anything certainly about them.  Until the contrary had been proven there was at least a possibility that they were less formidable than rumor had painted them.

Camp was pitched late that night far out on the flats.  During the preparation of supper Murray sat staring fixedly before him, deaf to all sounds and insensible to the activities of his companions.  He had lost his customary breeziness and his good nature; he was curt, saturnine, unsmiling.  Appleton undertook to arouse him from this abstraction, but Slater drew the young man aside hurriedly with a warning,

“Don’t do that, son, or you’ll wear splints for the rest of the trip.”