They sat up, but were too exhausted to rise.  Big Olaf, the sweat pouring from him, breathing with tremendous, painful gasps, pawed the air and vainly tried to speak.  Then he reached out his hand with unmistakable meaning; Smoke extended his, and they shook.

“It’s a dead heat,” Smoke could hear the Recorder saying, but it was as if in a dream, and the voice was very thin and very far away.  “And all I can say is that you both win.  You’ll have to divide the claim between you.  You’re partners.”

Their two arms pumped up and down as they ratified the decision.  Big Olaf nodded his head with great emphasis, and spluttered.  At last he got it out.

“You damn chechako,” was what he said, but in the saying of it was admiration.  “I don’t know how you done it, but you did.”

Outside, the great crowd was noisily massed, while the office was packing and jamming.  Smoke and Big Olaf essayed to rise, and each helped the other to his feet.  Smoke found his legs weak under him, and staggered drunkenly.  Big Olaf tottered toward him.

“I’m sorry my dogs jumped yours.”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Smoke panted back.  “I heard you yell.”

“Say,” Big Olaf went on with shining eyes.  “That girl—­one damn fine girl, eh?”

“One damn fine girl,” Smoke agreed.

VII.  THE LITTLE MAN

“I wisht you wasn’t so set in your ways,” Shorty demurred.  “I’m sure scairt of that glacier.  No man ought to tackle it by his lonely.”

Smoke laughed cheerfully, and ran his eye up the glistening face of the tiny glacier that filled the head of the valley.  “Here it is August already, and the days have been getting shorter for two months,” he epitomized the situation.  “You know quartz, and I don’t.  But I can bring up the grub, while you keep after that mother lode.  So-long.  I’ll be back by to-morrow evening.”

He turned and started.

“I got a hunch something’s goin’ to happen,” Shorty pleaded after him.

But Smoke’s reply was a bantering laugh.  He held on down the little valley, occasionally wiping the sweat from his forehead, the while his feet crushed through ripe mountain raspberries and delicate ferns that grew beside patches of sun-sheltered ice.

In the early spring he and Shorty had come up the Stewart River and launched out into the amazing chaos of the region where Surprise Lake lay.  And all of the spring and half of the summer had been consumed in futile wanderings, when, on the verge of turning back, they caught their first glimpse of the baffling, gold-bottomed sheet of water which had lured and fooled a generation of miners.  Making their camp in the old cabin which Smoke had discovered on his previous visit, they had learned three things:  first, heavy nugget gold was carpeted thickly on the lake bottom; next, the gold could be dived for in the shallower