boy. What could he mean? Why had he sung
them?

Suddenly it all seemed clear to him; the man was being watched and dared
not do a thing openly. He wished to send them a warning. This was his only
way. And the warning was doubtless to tell them to stay away from the
death trap where Frank Langlois had perished.

"Well," Johnny exclaimed, as if addressing the person who had sent the
message, "if that's all there is to it, we've already complied with your
wish."

He turned and looked back down the hill. A few hundred yards away a hole
yawned in the hard crusted snow. Twenty yards from this was a cone of
black earth twice the height of a man. This was their pile of pay dirt.
For five days now, they had been working on the second mine of the seven.
The pay dirt they had struck was not as rich as they hoped to find, but it
would repay the labor of sluicing. It was growing richer each hour. They
hoped in time to uncover the mother-lode. This would pay for panning and
yield a rich reward.

It was placer mining. Beside the mine entrance stood a steam thawer, a
coal-heated boiler such as is used for driving a sawmill or grist-mill
engine. From this a wire-wound hose extended into the interior of the
mine. The mine was fifteen feet underground, but even here the earth was
frozen solid. Attached to the hose was a sharp pointed iron pipe. This
pipe was perforated in hundreds of places. When it was driven into the
earth and the steam turned on, it thawed the flinty soil and rendered it
pliable to the pick and shovel.

"Yes," Johnny heaved a sigh of satisfaction, "yes, sometime, perhaps in
two or three months, we will send by reliable reindeer carriers our first
gift of gold to the orphans of Russia."

He made his way up the hill to the point where he had found the
phonographic record, for he was curious to know the lay of the land above
that point. He wanted to know where this strange person had been hiding
when he set the disk rolling.

"It's strange, mighty strange," he whispered, as he looked up at the
cliffs which towered skyward some three hundred yards above the spot where
he stood.

Then suddenly he stopped short. Had he seen a dark shadow flit from one
little ridge to another? The surface of the hill was very uneven. He could
not tell.

At first he was inclined to turn back. But he had started for the rocky
cliff and he was not given to turning back. He went on.

As he moved forward, his thoughts were again of t