“It’s sufficient. The investigators will set out forthwith. We shall need a competent leader for the work. Therefore, I call on you, Number Three,” he said, pointing at the stoutish figure sitting third amongst his audience. “You are best qualified in every way. You have years of the gold trail behind you, and you will know how best to deal with any opposition you may encounter from this man. The meeting is closed.”
He reached up and unhooked the lantern in the roof. The next moment the cellar was in complete darkness.
CHAPTER XI
The Wreck at the River Mouth
SASA MANNIK was down at the seashore. He was labouring over his fishing tackle, which was only little less primitive than that of his Eskimo fore-bears. His sturdy bluff-nosed, sea-going boat was lying nearby on the shelving beach, awaiting the moment when she would be run down into the racing waters waiting to receive it. The man was a half-breed Eskimo, in whom White and Indian ran a neck-and-neck race with the original stock from which he sprang.
Sasa was a characteristic creature. In build he was squat, and of enormous physical strength. He had a beardless face that might have belonged to almost any native race. His eyes were mere deeply set slits; his mouth was large and loose; his nose was as flat and broad as his cheekbones were high and prominent; while his lank black hair suggested nothing so much as a horse’s mane. He was certainly unprepossessing and even crafty to look at, but he was by no means without many redeeming qualities. He was a fisherman first and before everything, but he was a reasonably faithful servant, too. His greatest weakness, however, was an addiction to a picturesque and superstitious lying which Ivor McLagan, who employed him, chose to condone for the sake of his otherwise useful service. The engineer liked the man. Sasa made a curious appeal to him. And so he paid him ten dollars a month, and permitted him to cook, and wash, and look after the log shanty, which, like an eyrie, he had set up on the high cliffs overlooking the mouth of the Alsek River.
It was a no less bleak and desolate inlet than a hundred others which serrated the southern coast line of Alaska. Attacked from sea and land, a way had been driven through the granite cliffs so that river and sea merged in an iron-bound bay, sea-bird haunted and without a vestige of softening from its barren austerity. Its waters were set with numberless upstanding granite fangs, and the swirl of its turbulent tide revealed submerged traps in almost any direction. The bay possessed two definite, comparatively free and wide channels. One travelled southwards while the other hugged tightly to the northern shore. But even in these the racing tide looked ready to crash the adventurous navigator upon unguessed disasters.
Sasa Mannik stood up from his labours and his narrowed eyes gazed contemplatively out over the racing waters. He, like his employer, saw none of the natural terrors with which their high-perched home was surrounded. Ivor McLagan had no business with the hauntings and dread which Nature strives to inspire in her harsher moments. His was the hard, practical, hungry mind of one of the earth’s seekers. His only care was for the lure of the business which was his. His home had been pitched in the heart of this natural wilderness, that, in his brief moments of rest from the labours of his enterprise farther up the river, he might look out on the wide-open sea. Whatever the storms that howled about his staunch homestead there were always hope, and health, and sunlight in the breath of the restless ocean.