d. "I never thought you'd
get this far," she informed him.

Again, and greedily, he sniffed the air. "As I live, coffee!" He turned
and directly addressed her: "I'll give you my little finger--cut it
right off now; I'll do anything; I'll be your slave for a year and a day
or any other old time, if you'll give me a cup out of that pot."

And over the coffee he gave his name and learned hers--Joy Gastell.
Also, he learned that she was an old-timer in the country. She had been
born in a trading-post on the Great Slave, and as a child had crossed
the Rockies with her father and come down to the Yukon. She was going
in, she said, with her father, who had been delayed by business in
Seattle, and who had then been wrecked on the ill-fated Chanter and
carried back to Puget Sound by the rescuing steamer.

In view of the fact that she was still in her blankets, he did not
make it a long conversation, and, heroically declining a second cup of
coffee, he removed himself and his heaped and shifted baggage from her
tent. Further, he took several conclusions away with him: she had a
fetching name and fetching eyes; could not be more than twenty, or
twenty-one or -two; her father must be French; she had a will of her own
and temperament to burn; and she had been educated elsewhere than on the
frontier.

Over the ice-scoured rocks and above the timber-line, the trail ran
around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy
Camp and the first scrub-pines. To pack his heavy outfit around would
take days of heart-breaking toil. On the lake was a canvas boat employed
in freighting. Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him and his
ton across. But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty dollars a
ton.

"You've got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat," Kit said to the
ferryman. "Do you want another gold-mine?"

"Show me," was the answer.

"I'll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit. It's an idea,
not patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it. Are
you game?"

The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks.

"Very well. You see that glacier. Take a pick-axe and wade into it. In a
day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom. See the point? The
Chilkoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation, Limited. You
can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day, and have no
work to do but collect the coin."

Two hours later, Kit's ton was across t