e arrival and departure of the Japanese
gunboat, they attacked the little U-shaped beach that lay between two
buttresses of the volcano and sloped sharply down to the sea. Twenty-one
men, a lad and a woman, they went at the despoiling of it with a sort of
obsession, led, rather than driven, by Lund, who worked among the rest
of them like a Hercules.

From the beginning the tongue of shingle promised to be almost
incredibly rich. Between these two spurs of mountain the tide had washed
and flung the rich, free-flaking gold of a submarine vein, piling it up
for unguessable years. Ebb tides had worked it in among the gravel,
floods had beaten it down; the deeper they went to bedrock, the richer
the pan.

The men's fancy estimate of a million dollars began speedily to seem
small as the work progressed, systematically stripping the rocky floor
of all its shingle, foot by foot, and cubic yard by cubic yard, cradling
it in crude rockers, fluming it, vaporizing the amalgam of gold and
mercury, and adding pound after pound of virgin gold to the sacks in the
schooner's strong-room.

They worked at first in alternating shifts of four hours, by day and
night, under the sun, the moon, the stars and the flaming aurora. The
crust was drilled here and there where it had frozen into conglomerate,
and exploded by dynamite, carefully placed so as not to dislodge the
masses of ice that overhung the schooner. Fires to thaw out the ground
were unavailable for sheer lack of fuel; there was no driftwood between
these forestless shores. What fuel could be spared was conserved for use
under the boilers that melted ice to provide water for the cradles and
flumes, and help to cook the meals that Tamada prepared out-of-doors for
the workers.

Buckets of coffee, stews, and thick soups of peas and lentils, masses of
beans with plenty of fat pork, these were what they craved after hours
of tremendous endeavor. Despite the cold, they sweated profusely at
their tasks, stripping off over-garments as they picked and shoveled or
crowbarred out the rich gravel.

Peggy Simms worked with the rest, assisting Tamada, helping to serve
with Sandy. Deming, and Beale, the man with the damaged ribs, were given
odd jobs that they could handle: feeding the fires, washing up, or
assisting at the little forge where the drills were sharpened.

Through all of it Lund was supreme as working superintendent. There was
no job that he could not, did not, handle better th