"It was a mercy you did not overturn the stove," she said. He followed her glance and saw a sheet-iron stove and a coffee-pot, attended by a young squaw. He sniffed the coffee and looked back to the girl. "I'm a chechaquo," he said. Her bored expression told him that he was stating the obvious. But he was unabashed. "I've shed my shooting-irons," he added. Then she recognized him, and her eyes lighted. "I never thought you'd get this far," she informed him. Again, and greedily, he sniffed the air. "As I live, coffee!" He turned and directly addressed her. "I'll give you my little finger--cut it right off now; I'll do anything; I'll be your slave for a year and a day or any other odd time, if you'll give me a cup out of that pot." And over the coffee he gave his name and learned hers--Joy Gastell. Also, he learned that she was an old-timer in the country. She had been born in a trading post on the Great Slave, and as a child had crossed the Rockies with her father and come down to the Yukon. She was going in, she said, with her father, who had been delayed by business in Seattle, and who had then been wrecked on the ill-fated Chanter and carried back to Puget Sound by the rescuing steamer. In view of the fact that she was still in her blankets, he did not make it a long conversation, and, heroically declining a second cup of coffee, he removed himself and his quarter of a ton of baggage from her tent. Further, he took several conclusions away with him: she had a fetching name and fetching eyes; could not be more than twenty, or twenty-one or -two; her father must be French; she had a will of her own and temperament to burn; and she had been educated elsewhere than on the frontier. VI. Over the ice-scoured rocks, and above the timber-line, the trail ran around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy Camp and the first scrub pines. To pack his heavy outfit around would take days of heart-breaking toil. On the lake was a canvas boat employed in freighting. Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him and his ton across. But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty dollars a ton. "You've got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat," Kit said to the ferryman. "Do you want another gold-mine?" "Show me," was the answer. "I'll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit. It's an idea, not patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it. Are you game?" The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks. "Very well. You see that glacier. Take a pick-axe and wade into it. In a day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom. See the point? The Chilcoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation, Limited. You can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day, and have no work to do but collect the coin."