“Gordon himself.”

“Gordon!”

“Yes!  And he’s got a tough gang with him.”

“Armed?”

“Sure!  This is a bear country, you know.”

“Listen!  I want you to tell him, as innocently as you can, that we’re on the job ahead of him.  Tell him we’ve been there for a week and have loaded that first rock shoulder and expect to shoot it off as soon as possible.  You can tell him, too, that I’m up there and he’d better see me before trying to pass through.”

“I’ve got you!  But that won’t stop him.”

“Perhaps!  Now have you any grub in camp?”

“No.”

“We threw ours overboard, to make time.  Send up anything you can spare; we’re played out.”

“It’ll be nothing but beans, and they’re moldy.”

“We can fight on beans, and we’ll eat the paper off those giant cartridges if we have to.  Don’t fail to warn Gordon that the hillside is mined, and warn him loud enough for his swampers to hear.”

Appleton hastened back to his boats, where he found his men sprawled among the boulders sleeping the sleep of complete exhaustion.  They were drenched, half numbed by the chill air of the glacier, and it was well that he roused them.

“Gordon’s men are camped just above,” he told them.  “But we must get through without waking them.  No talking, now, until we’re safe.”

Silently the crew resumed their tow-lines, fitting them to their aching shoulders; gingerly the boats were edged out into the current.

It was fortunate that the place was noisy, and that the voice of the river and the periodic bombardment from the glaciers drowned the rattle of loose stones dislodged by their footsteps.  But it was a trying half-hour that followed.  Dan did not breathe easily until his party had crossed the bar and were safely out upon the placid waters of the lake, with the last stage of the journey ahead of them.

About mid-forenoon of the following day Curtis Gordon halted his party at the lower end of the rapids and went on alone.  To his right lay the cataract and along the steep slope against which it chafed wound a faint footpath scarcely wide enough in places for a man to pass.  This trail dipped in and out, wound back and forth around frowning promontories.  It dodged through alder thickets or spanned slides of loose rock, until, three miles above, it emerged into the more open country back of the parent range.  It had been worn by the feet of wild animals and it followed closely the right-of-way of the S. R. & N. To the left the hills rose swiftly in great leaps to the sky; to the right, so close that a false step meant disaster, roared the cataract, muddy and foam-flecked.

As Gordon neared the first bluff he heard, above the clamor of the flood, a faint metallic “tap-tap-tap,” as of hammer and drill, and, drawing closer, he saw Dan Appleton perched upon a rock which commanded a view in both directions.  Just around the shoulder, in a tiny gulch, or gutter from the slopes above, were pitched several tents, from one of which curled the smoke of a cook-stove.  Close at hand were moored four battered poling-boats.