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.