"Friend? Um-m, no! I'm just him when he ain't around." In a loud tone he inquired of the girl at the news-stand, "Have you got any wintergreen gum?" "Mr. O'Neil is not here." The fat man stared at his informant accusingly, "Ain't this the fifteenth?" he asked. "It is." "Then he's here, all right!" "Mr. O'Neil is not in," the clerk repeated, gazing fixedly over Mr. Slater's left shoulder. "Well, I guess his room will do for me. I ain't particular." "His room is occupied at present. If you care to wait you will find--" Precisely what it was that he was to find Tom never learned, for at that moment the breath was driven out of his lungs by a tremendous whack, and he turned to behold Dr. Stanley Gray towering over him, an expansive smile upon his face. "Look out!" Slater coughed, and seized his Adam's apple. "You made me swallow my cud." The two shook hands warmly. "We've been expecting you, Tom," said the Doctor. "We're all here except Parker, and he wired he'd arrive to-morrow." "Where's Murray?" "He's around somewhere." Slater turned a resentful, smoldering gaze upon the hotel clerk, and looked about him for a chair with a detachable leg, but the object of his regard disappeared abruptly behind the key-rack. "This rat-brained party said he hadn't come." "He arrived this morning, but we've barely seen him." "I left Appleton in Juneau. He'll be down on the next boat." "Appleton? Who's he?" Dr. Gray inquired. "Oh, he's a new member of the order--initiated last month. He's learning to be a sleep-hater, like the rest of us. He's recording the right-of-way." "What's in the air? None of us know. We didn't even know Murray's whereabouts--thought he was in Kyak, until he sounded the tocsin from New York. The other boys have quit their jobs and I've sold my practice." "It's a railroad!" Dr. Gray grinned. "Well! That's the tone I use when I break the news that it's a girl instead of a boy." "It's a railroad," Slater repeated, "up the Salmon River!" "Good Lord! What about those glaciers?" "Oh, it ain't so much the glaciers and the floating icebergs and the raging chasms and the quaking tundra--Murray thinks he can overcome them--it's the mosquitoes and the Copper Trust that are going to figure in this enterprise. One of 'em will be the death of me, and the other will bust Murray, if he don't look out. Say, my neck is covered with bumps till it feels like a dog-collar of seed pearls." "Do you think we'll have a fight?" asked the doctor, hopefully. "A fight! It'll be the worst massacre since the Little Big Horn. We're surrounded already, and no help in sight." O'Neil found his "boys" awaiting him when he returned to his room. There was Mellen, lean, gaunt and serious-minded, with the dust of Chihuahua still upon his shoes; there were McKay, the superintendent, who had arrived from California that morning; Sheldon, the commissary man; Elkins; "Doc" Gray; and "Happy Tom" Slater. Parker, the chief engineer, alone was absent.