“Well,” Johnny exclaimed, as if addressing the person who had sent the message, “if that’s all there is to it, we’ve already complied with your wish.”
He turned and looked back down the hill. A few hundred yards away a hole yawned in the hard crusted snow. Twenty yards from this was a cone of black earth twice the height of a man. This was their pile of pay dirt. For five days now, they had been working on the second mine of the seven. The pay dirt they had struck was not as rich as they hoped to find, but it would repay the labor of sluicing. It was growing richer each hour. They hoped in time to uncover the mother-lode. This would pay for panning and yield a rich reward.
It was placer mining. Beside the mine entrance stood a steam thawer, a coal-heated boiler such as is used for driving a sawmill or grist-mill engine. From this a wire-wound hose extended into the interior of the mine. The mine was fifteen feet underground, but even here the earth was frozen solid. Attached to the hose was a sharp pointed iron pipe. This pipe was perforated in hundreds of places. When it was driven into the earth and the steam turned on, it thawed the flinty soil and rendered it pliable to the pick and shovel.
“Yes,” Johnny heaved a sigh of satisfaction, “yes, sometime, perhaps in two or three months, we will send by reliable reindeer carriers our first gift of gold to the orphans of Russia.”
He made his way up the hill to the point where he had found the phonographic record, for he was curious to know the lay of the land above that point. He wanted to know where this strange person had been hiding when he set the disk rolling.
“It’s strange, mighty strange,” he whispered, as he looked up at the cliffs which towered skyward some three hundred yards above the spot where he stood.
Then suddenly he stopped short. Had he seen a dark shadow flit from one little ridge to another? The surface of the hill was very uneven. He could not tell.
At first he was inclined to turn back. But he had started for the rocky cliff and he was not given to turning back. He went on.
As he moved forward, his thoughts were again of that strange fellow who had made the record on the disk.
“Couldn’t be a native” he murmured. “No native has a voice like that. If it’s a strange white man, why doesn’t he join us? Perhaps—” He stopped short in his tracks. “Perhaps it’s one of our own number. Perhaps it’s Pant. He’s queer enough to do or be anything.”