"Good Lord! What about those glaciers?"
"Oh, it ain't so much the glaciers and the floating icebergs and the raging chasms and the quaking tundra—Murray thinks he can overcome them—it's the mosquitoes and the Copper Trust that are going to figure in this enterprise. One of 'em will be the death of me, and the other will bust Murray, if he don't look out. Say, my neck is covered with bumps till it feels like a dog-collar of seed pearls."
"Do you think we'll have a fight?" asked the doctor, hopefully.
"A fight! It'll be the worst massacre since the Little Big Horn. We're surrounded already, and no help in sight."
O'Neil found his "boys" awaiting him when he returned to his room. There was Mellen, lean, gaunt and serious-minded, with the dust of Chihuahua still upon his shoes; there were McKay, the superintendent, who had arrived from California that morning; Sheldon, the commissary man; Elkins; "Doc" Gray; and "Happy Tom" Slater. Parker, the chief engineer, alone was absent.
"I sent Appleton in from Cortez," he told them, "to come down the river and make the preliminary survey into Omar. He cables me that he has filed his locations and everything is O. K. On my way East I stopped here long enough to buy the Omar cannery, docks, buildings, and town site. It's all mine, and it will save us ninety days' work in getting started."
"What do you make of that tundra between Omar and the canon?" queried McKay, who had crossed the Salmon River delta and knew its character. "It's like calf's-foot jelly—a man bogs down to his waist in it."
"We'll fill and trestle," said O'Neil.
"We couldn't move a pile-driver twenty feet."
"It's frozen solid in winter."