the fire.

"Herbert Spencer was nearly forty before he caught the vision of his
greatest efficiency and desire. I'm none so slow. I didn't have to wait
till I was thirty to catch mine. Right here is my efficiency and desire.
Almost, Yellow Face, do I wish I had been born a wolf-boy and been
brother all my days to you and yours."

For days he wandered through a chaos of canyons and divides which did
not yield themselves to any rational topographical plan. It was as if
they had been flung there by some cosmic joker. In vain he sought for
a creek or feeder that flowed truly south toward the McQuestion and
the Stewart. Then came a mountain storm that blew a blizzard across the
riff-raff of high and shallow divides. Above timber-line, fireless, for
two days, he struggled blindly to find lower levels. On the second day
he came out upon the rim of an enormous palisade. So thickly drove the
snow that he could not see the base of the wall, nor dared he attempt
the descent. He rolled himself in his robes and huddled the dogs about
him in the depths of a snow-drift, but did not permit himself to sleep.

In the morning, the storm spent, he crawled out to investigate. A
quarter of a mile beneath him, beyond all mistake, lay a frozen,
snow-covered lake. About it, on every side, rose jagged peaks. It
answered the description. Blindly, he had found Surprise Lake.

"Well named," he muttered, an hour later, as he came out upon its
margin. A clump of aged spruce was the only woods. On his way to it,
he stumbled upon three graves, snow-buried, but marked by hand-hewn
head-posts and undecipherable writing. On the edge of the woods was a
small ramshackle cabin. He pulled the latch and entered. In a corner, on
what had once been a bed of spruce-boughs, still wrapped in mangy
furs that had rotted to fragments, lay a skeleton. The last visitor to
Surprise Lake, was Smoke's conclusion, as he picked up a lump of gold as
large as his doubled fist. Beside the lump was a pepper-can filled with
nuggets of the size of walnuts, rough-surfaced, showing no signs of
wash.

So true had the tale run that Smoke accepted without question that the
source of the gold was the lake's bottom. Under many feet of ice and
inaccessible, there was nothing to be done, and at midday, from the rim
of the palisade, he took a farewell look back and down at his find.

"It's all right, Mr. Lake," he said. "You just keep right on staying
there. I'm coming back to drain y