utile wanderings, when, on the verge of turning back, they caught their
first glimpse of the baffling, gold-bottomed sheet of water which had
lured and fooled a generation of miners. Making their camp in the old
cabin which Smoke had discovered on his previous visit, they had learned
three things: first, heavy nugget gold was carpeted thickly on the lake
bottom; next, the gold could be dived for in the shallower portions, but
the temperature of the water was man-killing; and, finally, the draining
of the lake was too stupendous a task for two men in the shorter half
of a short summer. Undeterred, reasoning from the coarseness of the gold
that it had not traveled far, they had set out in search of the mother
lode. They had crossed the big glacier that frowned on the southern rim
and devoted themselves to the puzzling maze of small valleys and canyons
beyond, which, by most unmountainlike methods, drained, or had at one
time drained, into the lake.

The valley Smoke was descending gradually widened after the fashion of
any normal valley; but, at the lower end, it pinched narrowly between
high precipitous walls and abruptly stopped in a cross wall. At the
base of this, in a welter of broken rock, the streamlet disappeared,
evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from
the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had
ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened
its shallowness. It was this shallowness that made its draining
feasible. All about arose jumbled mountains, with ice-scarred peaks
and crags, grotesquely shaped and grouped. All was topsyturvy and
unsystematic--a Dore nightmare. So fantastic and impossible was it that
it affected Smoke as more like a cosmic landscape-joke than a rational
portion of earth's surface. There were many glaciers in the canyons,
most of them tiny, and, as he looked, one of the larger ones, on the
north shore, calved amid thunders and splashings. Across the lake,
seemingly not more than half a mile, but, as he well knew, five miles
away, he could see the bunch of spruce-trees and the cabin. He looked
again to make sure, and saw smoke clearly rising from the chimney.
Somebody else had surprised themselves into finding Surprise Lake, was
his conclusion, as he turned to climb the southern wall.

From the top of this he came down into a little valley, flower-floored
and lazy with the hum of bees, that behaved quite as a