“We've done some almighty hustling. Takes money, and we hadn't a cent to start with, you know--had to build a house and barn, get horses and plows, and all the rest. She taught school two years. Then the boy came. But we've got it. You ought to see those trees we planted--a hundred acres of them, almost mature now. But it's all been outgo, and the mortgage working overtime. That's why I'm here. She'd 'a' come along only for the kids and the trees. She's handlin' that end, and here I am, a gosh-danged expensive millionaire--in prospect.” He looked happily across the sun-dazzle on the ice to the green water of the lake along the farther shore, took a final look at the photograph, and murmured: “She's some woman, that. She's hung on. She just wouldn't die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she's thin now. Never will be fat. But it's the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris. I don't think much of that burg, but she's just hankered for it all her life.” “Well, here's the gold that will take you to Paris,” Smoke assured him. “All we've got to do is to get our hands on it.” Carson nodded with glistening eyes. “Say--that farm of ours is the prettiest piece of orchard land on all the Pacific coast. Good climate, too. Our lungs will never get touched again there. Ex-lungers have to be almighty careful, you know. If you're thinking of settling, well, just take a peep in at our valley before you settle, that's all. And fishing! Say!--did you ever get a thirty-five-pound salmon on a six-ounce rod? Some fight, bo', some fight!” “I'm lighter than you by forty pounds,” Carson said. “Let me go first.” They stood on the edge of the crevasse. It was enormous and ancient, fully a hundred feet across, with sloping, age-eaten sides instead of sharp-angled rims. At this one place it was bridged by a huge mass of pressure-hardened snow that was itself half ice. Even the bottom of this mass they could not see, much less the bottom of the crevasse. Crumbling and melting, the bridge threatened imminent collapse. There were signs where recent portions had broken away, and even as they studied it a mass of half a ton dislodged and fell. “Looks pretty bad,” Carson admitted with an ominous head-shake. “And it looks much worse than if I wasn't a millionaire.” “But we've got to tackle it,” Smoke said. “We're almost across. We can't go back. We can't camp here on the ice all night. And there's no other way. Shorty and I explored for a mile up. It was in better shape, though, when we crossed.” “It's one at a time, and me first.” Carson took the part coil of rope from Smoke's hand. “You'll have to cast off. I'll take the rope and the pick. Gimme your hand so I can slip down easy.”