with gold?"

"Sure. There's some of the churning." Smoke dipped in his overalls
pocket and brought forth half a dozen nuggets. "That's the stuff. All
you have to do is go down to bottom, blind if you want to, and pick up a
handful. Then you've got to run half a mile to get up your circulation."

"Well, gosh-dash my dingbats, if you haven't beaten me to it," Carson
swore whimsically, but his disappointment was patent. "An' I thought I'd
scooped the whole caboodle. Anyway, I've had the fun of getting here."

"Fun!" Smoke cried. "Why, if we can ever get our hands on all that
bottom, we'll make Rockefeller look like thirty cents."

"But it's yours," was Carson's objection.

"Nothing to it, my friend. You've got to realize that no gold deposit
like it has been discovered in all the history of mining. It will take
you and me and my partner and all the friends we've got to lay our hands
on it. All Bonanza and Eldorado, dumped together, wouldn't be richer
than half an acre down here. The problem is to drain the lake. It will
take millions. And there's only one thing I'm afraid of. There's so
much of it that if we fail to control the output it will bring about the
demonetization of gold."

"And you tell me--" Carson broke off, speechless and amazed.

"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 h