Dr. Gray grinned.  “Well!  That’s the tone I use when I break the news that it’s a girl instead of a boy.”

“It’s a railroad,” Slater repeated, “up the Salmon River!”

“Good Lord!  What about those glaciers?”

“Oh, it ain’t so much the glaciers and the floating icebergs and the raging chasms and the quaking tundra—­Murray thinks he can overcome them—­it’s the mosquitoes and the Copper Trust that are going to figure in this enterprise.  One of ’em will be the death of me, and the other will bust Murray s if he don’t look out.  Say, my neck is covered with bumps till it feels like a dog-collar of seed pearls.”

“Do you think we’ll have a fight?” asked the doctor, hopefully.

“A fight!  It’ll be the worst massacre since the Little Big Horn.  We’re surrounded already, and no help in sight.”

O’Neil found his “boys” awaiting him when he returned to his room.  There was Mellen, lean, gaunt and serious-minded, with the dust of Chihuahua still upon his shoes; there were McKay, the superintendent, who had arrived from California that morning; Sheldon, the commissary man; Elkins; “Doc” Gray; and “Happy Tom” Slater.  Parker, the chief engineer, alone was absent.

“I sent Appleton in from Cortez,” he told them, “to come down the river and make the preliminary survey into Omar.  He cables me that he has filed his locations and everything is O. K. On my way East I stopped here long enough to buy the Omar cannery, docks, buildings, and town site.  It’s all mine, and it will save us ninety days’ work in getting started.”

“What do you make of that tundra between Omar and the canon?” queried McKay, who had crossed the Salmon River delta and knew its character.  “It’s like calf’s-foot jelly—­a man bogs down to his waist in it.”

“We’ll fill and trestle,” said O’Neil.

“We couldn’t move a pile-driver twenty feet.”

“It’s frozen solid in winter.”

McKay nodded.  “We’ll have to drive steam points ahead of every pile, I suppose, and we’ll need Eskimos to work in that cold, but I guess we can manage somehow.”

“That country is like an apple pie,” said Tom Slater—­“it’s better cold than hot.  There’s a hundred inches of rainfall at Omar in summer.  We’ll all have web feet when we get out.”

Sheldon, the light-hearted commissary man, spoke up.  “If it’s as wet as all that, well need Finns—­instead of Eskimos.”  He was promptly hooted into silence.

“I understand those glaciers come down to the edge of the river,” the superintendent ventured.

“They do!” O’Neil acknowledged, “and they’re the liveliest ones I ever saw.  Tom can answer for that.  One of them is fully four hundred feet high at the face and four miles across.  They’re constantly breaking, too.”

“Lumps bigger than this hotel,” supplemented Slater.  “It’s quite a sight—­equal to anything in the state of Maine.”