Smoke grinned, stepped to the fake windlass, and gave it a couple of creaking turns.  Shorty pulled out the moss-chinking from between the logs so as to make peep-holes on every side of the cabin.  Then he blew out the candle.

“Now,” he whispered at the end of half an hour.

Smoke turned the windlass slowly, paused after several minutes, caught up a galvanized bucket filled with earth and struck it with slide and scrape and grind against the heap of rocks they had hauled in.  Then he lighted a cigarette, shielding the flame of the match in his hands.

“They’s three of ’em,” Shorty whispered.  “You oughta saw ’em.  Say, when you made that bucket-dump noise they was fair quiverin’.  They’s one at the window now tryin’ to peek in.”

Smoke glowed his cigarette, and glanced at his watch.

“We’ve got to do this thing regularly,” he breathed.  “We’ll haul up a bucket every fifteen minutes.  And in the meantime—­”

Through triple thicknesses of sacking, he struck a cold-chisel on the face of a rock.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” Shorty moaned with delight.  He crept over noiselessly from the peep-hole.  “They’ve got their heads together, an’ I can almost see ’em talkin’.”

And from then until four in the morning, at fifteen-minute intervals, the seeming of a bucket was hoisted on the windlass that creaked and ran around on itself and hoisted nothing.  Then their visitors departed, and Smoke and Shorty went to bed.

After daylight, Shorty examined the moccasin-marks.  “Big Bill Saltman was one of them,” he concluded.  “Look at the size of it.”

Smoke looked out over the river.  “Get ready for visitors.  There are two crossing the ice now.”

“Huh!  Wait till Breck files that string of claims at nine o’clock.  There’ll be two thousand crossing over.”

“And every mother’s son of them yammering ‘mother-lode,’” Smoke laughed. “‘The source of the Klondike placers found at last.’”

Shorty, who had clambered to the top of a steep shoulder of rock, gazed with the eye of a connoisseur at the strip they had staked.

“It sure looks like a true fissure vein,” he said.  “A expert could almost trace the lines of it under the snow.  It’d fool anybody.  The slide fills the front of it an’ see them outcrops?  Look like the real thing, only they ain’t.”

When the two men, crossing the river, climbed the zigzag trail up the slide, they found a closed cabin.  Bill Saltman, who led the way, went softly to the door, listened, then beckoned Wild Water Charley up to him.  From inside came the creak and whine of a windlass bearing a heavy load.  They waited at the final pause, then heard the lower-away and the impact of a bucket on rock.  Four times, in the next hour, they heard the thing repeated.  Then Wild Water knocked on the door.  From inside came low furtive noises, then silences, and more furtive noises, and at the end of five minutes Smoke, breathing heavily, opened the door an inch and peered out.  They saw on his face and shirt powdered rock-fragments.  His greeting was suspiciously genial.