arrived at the cabin on Tra-Lee. He gripped Smoke's
hand. "You should a-saw 'em. Ever kick over a ant-hole? Dawson's
just like that. Main Street was crawlin' an' hummin' when I pulled my
freight. You won't see Tra-Lee to-morrow for folks. An' if they ain't
some a-sneakin' acrost right now I don't know minin' nature, that's
all."

Smoke grinned, stepped to the fake windlass, and gave it a couple of
creaking turns. Shorty pulled out the moss-chinking from between the
logs so as to make peep-holes on every side of the cabin. Then he blew
out the candle.

"Now," he whispered at the end of half an hour.

Smoke turned the windlass slowly, paused after several minutes, caught
up a galvanized bucket filled with earth and struck it with slide and
scrape and grind against the heap of rocks they had hauled in. Then he
lighted a cigarette, shielding the flame of the match in his hands.

"They's three of 'em," Shorty whispered. "You oughta saw 'em. Say, when
you made that bucket-dump noise they was fair quiverin'. They's one at
the window now tryin' to peek in."

Smoke glowed his cigarette, and glanced at his watch.

"We've got to do this thing regularly," he breathed. "We'll haul up a
bucket every fifteen minutes. And in the meantime--"

Through triple thicknesses of sacking, he struck a cold-chisel on the
face of a rock.

"Beautiful, beautiful," Shorty moaned with delight. He crept over
noiselessly from the peep-hole. "They've got their heads together, an' I
can almost see 'em talkin'."

And from then until four in the morning, at fifteen-minute intervals,
the seeming of a bucket was hoisted on the windlass that creaked and ran
around on itself and hoisted nothing. Then their visitors departed, and
Smoke and Shorty went to bed.

After daylight, Shorty examined the moccasin-marks. "Big Bill Saltman
was one of them," he concluded. "Look at the size of it."

Smoke looked out over the river. "Get ready for visitors. There are two
crossing the ice now."

"Huh! Wait till Breck files that string of claims at nine o'clock.
There'll be two thousand crossing over."

"And every mother's son of them yammering 'mother-lode,'" Smoke laughed.
"'The source of the Klondike placers found at last.'"

Shorty, who had clambered to the top of a steep shoulder of rock, gazed
with the eye of a connoisseur at the strip they had staked.

"It sure looks like a true fissure vein," he said. "A expert could
almost trace the lines of it under