Smoke Bellew | Page 9

the fact that she was still in her blankets, he did not make it a
long conversation, and, heroically declining a second cup of coffee, he
removed himself and his heaped and shifted baggage from her tent.
Further, he took several conclusions away with him: she had a fetching
name and fetching eyes; could not be more than twenty, or twenty-one
or -two; her father must be French; she had a will of her own and
temperament to burn; and she had been educated elsewhere than on the
frontier.
Over the ice-scoured rocks and above the timber-line, the trail ran
around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy
Camp and the first scrub-pines. To pack his heavy outfit around would
take days of heart-breaking toil. On the lake was a canvas boat
employed in freighting. Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him
and his ton across. But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty
dollars a ton.
"You've got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat," Kit said to the

ferryman. "Do you want another gold-mine?"
"Show me," was the answer.
"I'll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit. It's an idea, not
patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it. Are you
game?"
The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks.
"Very well. You see that glacier. Take a pick-axe and wade into it. In a
day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom. See the point?
The Chilkoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation,
Limited. You can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day,
and have no work to do but collect the coin."
Two hours later, Kit's ton was across the lake, and he had gained three
days on himself. And when John Bellew overtook him, he was well
along toward Deep Lake, another volcanic pit filled with glacial water.
The last pack, from Long Lake to Linderman, was three miles, and the
trail, if trail it could be called, rose up over a thousand-foot hogback,
dropped down a scramble of slippery rocks, and crossed a wide stretch
of swamp. John Bellew remonstrated when he saw Kit arise with a
hundred pounds in the straps and pick up a fifty-pound sack of flour
and place it on top of the pack against the back of his neck.
"Come on, you chunk of the hard," Kit retorted. "Kick in on your
bear-meat fodder and your one suit of underclothes."
But John Bellew shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm getting old,
Christopher."
"You're only forty-eight. Do you realize that my grandfather, sir, your
father, old Isaac Bellew, killed a man with his fist when he was
sixty-nine years old?"
John Bellew grinned and swallowed his medicine.

"Avuncular, I want to tell you something important. I was raised a Lord
Fauntleroy, but I can outpack you, outwalk you, put you on your back,
or lick you with my fists right now."
John Bellew thrust out his hand and spoke solemnly. "Christopher, my
boy, I believe you can do it. I believe you can do it with that pack on
your back at the same time. You've made good, boy, though it's too
unthinkable to believe."
Kit made the round trip of the last pack four times a day, which is to
say that he daily covered twenty-four miles of mountain climbing,
twelve miles of it under one hundred and fifty pounds. He was proud,
hard, and tired, but in splendid physical condition. He ate and slept as
he had never eaten and slept in his life, and as the end of the work came
in sight, he was almost half sorry.
One problem bothered him. He had learned that he could fall with a
hundred-weight on his back and survive; but he was confident, if he fell
with that additional fifty pounds across the back of his neck, that it
would break it clean. Each trail through the swamp was quickly
churned bottomless by the thousands of packers, who were compelled
continually to make new trails. It was while pioneering such a new trail,
that he solved the problem of the extra fifty.
The soft, lush surface gave way under him; he floundered, and pitched
forward on his face. The fifty pounds crushed his face in the mud and
went clear without snapping his neck. With the remaining hundred
pounds on his back, he arose on hands and knees. But he got no farther.
One arm sank to the shoulder, pillowing his cheek in the slush. As he
drew this arm clear, the other sank to the shoulder. In this position it
was impossible to slip the straps, and the hundred-weight on his back