Over the ice-scoured rocks and above the timber-line, the trail ran around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy Camp and the first scrub-pines.  To pack his heavy outfit around would take days of heart-breaking toil.  On the lake was a canvas boat employed in freighting.  Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him and his ton across.  But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty dollars a ton.

“You’ve got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat,” Kit said to the ferryman.  “Do you want another gold-mine?”

“Show me,” was the answer.

“I’ll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit.  It’s an idea, not patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it.  Are you game?”

The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks.

“Very well.  You see that glacier.  Take a pick-axe and wade into it.  In a day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom.  See the point?  The Chilkoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation, Limited.  You can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day, and have no work to do but collect the coin.”

Two hours later, Kit’s ton was across the lake, and he had gained three days on himself.  And when John Bellew overtook him, he was well along toward Deep Lake, another volcanic pit filled with glacial water.

The last pack, from Long Lake to Linderman, was three miles, and the trail, if trail it could be called, rose up over a thousand-foot hogback, dropped down a scramble of slippery rocks, and crossed a wide stretch of swamp.  John Bellew remonstrated when he saw Kit arise with a hundred pounds in the straps and pick up a fifty-pound sack of flour and place it on top of the pack against the back of his neck.

“Come on, you chunk of the hard,” Kit retorted.  “Kick in on your bear-meat fodder and your one suit of underclothes.”

But John Bellew shook his head.  “I’m afraid I’m getting old, Christopher.”

“You’re only forty-eight.  Do you realize that my grandfather, sir, your father, old Isaac Bellew, killed a man with his fist when he was sixty-nine years old?”

John Bellew grinned and swallowed his medicine.

“Avuncular, I want to tell you something important.  I was raised a Lord Fauntleroy, but I can outpack you, outwalk you, put you on your back, or lick you with my fists right now.”

John Bellew thrust out his hand and spoke solemnly.  “Christopher, my boy, I believe you can do it.  I believe you can do it with that pack on your back at the same time.  You’ve made good, boy, though it’s too unthinkable to believe.”

Kit made the round trip of the last pack four times a day, which is to say that he daily covered twenty-four miles of mountain climbing, twelve miles of it under one hundred and fifty pounds.  He was proud, hard, and tired, but in splendid physical condition.  He ate and slept as he had never eaten and slept in his life, and as the end of the work came in sight, he was almost half sorry.