f them at
each handle, until a mass of stone rose from the stream. Then one guy
was slackened, and another hauled upon, until the rock swung over the
shingle across the river, where they let it fall. Part of the growing
pile would be used to build the road by which they brought supplies
down the gully.

In itself the work was arduous enough, since four men alone could toil
at the winch, and some of the masses they raised were ponderous.
Indeed, there was scarcely room for four persons on the shelf hewn out
above the tail of the pool, and the narrow strip of stone was slippery
with ice. Fine spray that froze on all it touched whirled about the
workers, and every now and then a heavy fragment that slipped from the
claws fell with a great splash. Nasmyth's wrists grew raw from the
rasp of the hide jacket, and wide cracks opened in his fingers.

"I remember it as cold as this only once before," he said. "It was
during the few days I spent between the logging camp and Waynefleet's
ranch."

Mattawa, who hove on the same handle, grinned. "Well," he said, "this
is a tolerable sample of blame hard weather while it lasts, but we get
months of it back East. Still, I guess we don't work then. No, sir,
unless we're chopping, we sit tight round the stove."

Mattawa was right in this. Excepting the loggers and the Northwest
Police, men do not work in the open at that temperature back East, nor
would they attempt it on the Pacific Slope were the cold continuous.
In the western half of British Columbia, however, long periods of
severe weather are rare. It is a variable zone, swept now and then by
damp, warm breezes, and men tell of sheltered valleys where flowers
blow the year round, though very few of those who ramble up and down
the Mountain Province ever chance upon them. But there are times when
the devastating cold of the Polar regions descends upon the lonely
ranges, as it had done upon the frost-bound canyon.

Those who toiled with Nasmyth were hardened men, and they held on
with cracked hands clenched on the winch-handles, or they splashed
through the icy shallows with the water in their boots, until, a
little before their dinner-hour, when three of them stood straining by
Nasmyth's side beneath the derrick as a mass of rock rose slowly to
the surface of the pool. Mattawa glanced at this weight dubiously, and
then up at the wire guy that gleamed with frozen spray high above his
head.

"I guess we've dropped on to a big o