“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 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.”