undred 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."

Over the jerky, the two men got acquainted, and Andy Carson unbosomed
himself of the story of his life. "I just knew I'd find Surprise Lake,"
he mumbled in the midst of mouthfuls. "I had to. I missed the French
Hill Benches, the Big Skookum, and Monte Cristo, and then it was
Surprise Lake or bust. And here I am. My wife knew I'd strike it. I've
got faith enough, but hers knocks mine galleywest. She's a corker,
a crackerjack--dead game, grit to her finger-ends, never-say-die, a
fighter from the drop of the hat, the one woman for me, true blue and
all the rest. Take a look at that."

He sprung open his watch, and on the inside cover Smoke saw the small,
pasted photograph of a bright-haired woman, framed on either side by the
laughing face of a child.

"Boys?" he queried.

"Boy and girl," Carson answered proudly. "He's a year and a half older."
He sighed. "They might have been some grown, but we had to wait. You
see, she was sick. Lungs. But she put up a fight. What'd we know
about such stuff? I was clerking, railroad clerk, Chicago, when we got
married. Her folks were tuberculous. Doctors didn't know much in those
days. They said it was hereditary. All her family had it. Caught it from
each other, only they never guessed it. Thought they were born with
it. Fate. She and I lived with them the first couple of years. I
wasn't afraid. No tuberculosis in my family. And I got it. That set me
thinking. It was contagious. I caught it from breathing their air.

"We talked it over, she and I. Then I jumped the family doctor and
consulted an up-to-date expert. He told me what I'd figured out for
myself, and said Arizona was the place for us. We pulled up stakes and
went down--no money, nothing. I got a job sheep-herding, and left her in
town--a lung town. It was filled to spilling with lungers.

"Of course, living and sleeping in the clean open, I started right in
to mend. I was away months at a time. Every time I came back, she was
worse. She just couldn't pick up. But w