The Glacier Gate: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

Forgetful of everything else for the moment, he stooped and gathered them out of the ice. There must have been a quart of the pebbles, of different sizes, of different colors, too. There were blue and green ones, crystals white like diamonds, and lumps of stone showing merely abortive flecks and veins of green—emerald matrix, he thought. It struck him that the Indians had had little knowledge, and had gathered indiscriminately everything that was crystalline.

He had indeed cut into a skin sack at the Indian’s belt, and, investigating it, he found still another handful of stones remaining. Some of these must be indubitable emeralds—splendid green crystals as large as the end of his thumb, almost clear of rock. Their possible flawing, and whether they could be cut to advantage, he was unable to guess; but they must be immensely valuable. With death all about him, and his own death impending over him, he sat by the pile of jewels and gloated, oblivious.

This was certainly the source of the emeralds that Morrison had found. There was no mine, no pocket in the glacier. These aborigines must have been messengers, burden carriers. They were taking the stones from the place where they had been found—perhaps a hundred miles away—to some other unknown point, perhaps as tribute to their chief, or destined for the Incas of far-away Peru. But how they had been washed out of the glacier he could not imagine, for there was no water, no dribble of moisture in this cavity.

Then the inevitable thought of the futility of it all came down black and crushing. He had found the treasure, and must stay trapped with it. The glacier gate would not open to let him out. He had wealth here; it represented power. It was enough to set all the wheels of Boston turning, to drive a steamer across the Atlantic. Strange that it could not lift the thirty feet of ice over his head!

Yet the mysterious suggestion of present wealth and power did provide strength to his soul. It seemed impossible that he could be going to perish beside that heap of precious stones. Luck had turned before when it was at the worst; and he could not refrain from examining the other bodies to see if they, too, carried emeralds.

The next nearest, when the skin wrappings were cut away, had a stone-headed club at its belt, and a bag indeed, but containing nothing but flint arrowheads. The prostrate figure came next, and he chipped away the ice to get at its waist. It carried no baggage at all, but a sort of spear shaft showed frozen under its body.

The fourth Indian was still embedded in ice, except for the arm and shoulder nearest him. Lang began to chip and hew to clear the body, and was working around to the other side, when the hatchet crashed through a thin ice wall into an open space beyond. He broke the aperture wider, and put his head through cautiously, with the arm holding the candle.

There was another of the usual fissures, a couple of feet wide. In splitting, the parting edges had torn the Indian’s body partly asunder; in fact, one leg was sticking in the ice on the other side. But Lang, hardened to horrors, hardly noticed this gruesome circumstance. He heard the ripple of water. There was a little stream flowing down the rounded bottom of the fissure.

More than that, he saw at once that the rending ice had torn the Indian’s skin swathings; green pebbles glittered in the tattered fur, and green stones lay scattered at the bottom of the running water.

Here was surely the direct source of Morrison’s find. The water came in, no doubt, from the melting at the top of the glacier. It must go out where the emeralds had gone. He had only to follow it to the outlet.