“And glad to have you.  It will take a year or two, with all the money we can raise, to drain the lake.  It can be done.  I’ve looked over the ground.  But it will take every man in the country that’s willing to work for wages.  We’ll need an army, and we need right now decent men in on the ground floor.  Are you in?”

“Am I in?  Don’t I look it?  I feel so much like a millionaire that I’m real timid about crossing that big glacier.  Couldn’t afford to break my neck now.  Wish I had some more of those hob-spikes.  I was just hammering the last in when you came along.  How’s yours?  Let’s see.”

Smoke held up his foot.

“Worn smooth as a skating-rink!” Carson cried.  “You’ve certainly been hiking some.  Wait a minute, and I’ll pull some of mine out for you.”

But Smoke refused to listen.  “Besides,” he said, “I’ve got about forty feet of rope cached where we take the ice.  My partner and I used it coming over.  It will be a cinch.”

It was a hard, hot climb.  The sun blazed dazzlingly on the ice-surface, and with streaming pores they panted from the exertion.  There were places, criss-crossed by countless fissures and crevasses, where an hour of dangerous toil advanced them no more than a hundred yards.  At two in the afternoon, beside a pool of water bedded in the ice, Smoke called a halt.

“Let’s tackle some of that jerky,” he said.  “I’ve been on short allowance, and my knees are shaking.  Besides, we’re across the worst.  Three hundred yards will fetch us to the rocks, and it’s easy going, except for a couple of nasty fissures and one bad one that heads us down toward the bulge.  There’s a weak ice-bridge there, but Shorty and I managed it.”

Over the jerky, the two men got acquainted, and Andy Carson unbosomed himself of the story of his life.  “I just knew I’d find Surprise Lake,” he mumbled in the midst of mouthfuls.  “I had to.  I missed the French Hill Benches, the Big Skookum, and Monte Cristo, and then it was Surprise Lake or bust.  And here I am.  My wife knew I’d strike it.  I’ve got faith enough, but hers knocks mine galleywest.  She’s a corker, a crackerjack—­dead game, grit to her finger-ends, never-say-die, a fighter from the drop of the hat, the one woman for me, true blue and all the rest.  Take a look at that.”

He sprung open his watch, and on the inside cover Smoke saw the small, pasted photograph of a bright-haired woman, framed on either side by the laughing face of a child.

“Boys?” he queried.

“Boy and girl,” Carson answered proudly.  “He’s a year and a half older.”  He sighed.  “They might have been some grown, but we had to wait.  You see, she was sick.  Lungs.  But she put up a fight.  What’d we know about such stuff?  I was clerking, railroad clerk, Chicago, when we got married.  Her folks were tuberculous.  Doctors didn’t know much in those days.  They said it was hereditary.  All her family had it.  Caught it from each other, only they never guessed it.  Thought they were born with it.  Fate.  She and I lived with them the first couple of years.  I wasn’t afraid.  No tuberculosis in my family.  And I got it.  That set me thinking.  It was contagious.  I caught it from breathing their air.