Argosy, Vol. 118, No. 2 — page 121: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A MAN TO cano and sloped sharply down to the sea. Twenty-one men, a lad, and a woman, they went at the despoiling of it with a sort of obsession, led, rather than driven, by Lund, who worked among the rest of them like a Hercules. From the beginning the tongue of shin- gle promised to be almost incredibly rich. Between these two spurs of mountain the tide had washed and flung the rich, free- flaking gold of a submarine vein, piling it up for unguessable years. Ebb tides had worked it in among the gravel, floods had beaten it down; the deeper you went to bed-rock, the richer the pan. The men’s fancy estimate of a million dollars began to speedily seem small as the work progressed, systematically stripping the rocky floor of all its shingle, foot by foot, and cubic yard by cubic yard, cradling it in crude rockers, fluming it, vaporizing the amalgam of gold and mercury, and adding pound after pound of virgin gold to the sacks in the schooner’s strong-room. They worked at first in alternating shifts of four hours, by day and night, under the sun, the moon, the stars, and the flaming | aurora. The crust_ was drilled here and there where it had frozen into conglomerate, and exploded by dynamite, carefully placed so as not to dislodge the masses of ice that overhung the schooner. Fires to thaw out the ground were unavailable for sheer lack of fuel; there was no driftwood between these forestless shores. What wood could be spared was conserved for use under the boilers that melted ice to provide water for the cradles and flumes and help to cook the meals that Tamada prepared out of doors for the workers. Buckets of coffee, stews, and thick soups of peas and lentils, messes of beans with plenty of fat pork, these were what they craved after hours of tremendous endeavor. Despite the cold, they sweated profusely at their tasks, stripping off over-garments as they picked and shoveled or crow- barred out the rich gravel. Peggy Simms worked with the rest, as- sisting Tamada, helping to serve with Sandy. Deming and Beale, the man with the damaged ribs, were given odd jobs that they could handle: feeding the fires, wash- HIS--MATE. 271 ing up, or assisting at the little forge where the drills were sharpened. Through all of it Lund was supreme as working superintendent. There was no job that he could not, did not handle better than any two of them, and, though Rainey could see a shrinkage, or a compression of his hulk as day by day he called upon it for heroic service, he never seemed to tire. ‘“ Got to keep ’em at it,” he would say in the cabin. ‘“ No time to lose, an’ the odds all against us, in a way, barring luck. That’s what we got to count on, but we don’t want them thinkin’ that. If the weather don’t break—an’ break jest right, as soon as we've cleaned up, we’re stung. Though Ill blast a way out of this shore ice, if it comes to the worst. some dynamite on purpose.”’ “We ought to have brought a steam- shovel along,” said Rainey. He was hard as iron, but he had had a tough apprentice- I saved out — ship to labor, and his hands and nails, he ~ fancied, would never get into shape again. ‘Now you're talkin’,” agreed Lund. ‘* We c’ud have handled it in fine shape an’ left the machine behind as junk or a souve- nir for our Jap friends. We’ve got to cut out this four-hour shift. Too much time wasted changin’. Too many meals. We'll make it one long, steady shift of all hands long as we can stand up to it, an’ all git reg’lar sleep. I’m needin’ some myself.” Rainey knew that neither he nor Han- | sen got within two-thirds as much out of their shifts as when Lund was in command, though he had given them the pick of the men. It was not that the men malingered, they simply, neither of them, had the knack of keeping the work going at top speed and top effectiveness. But, with Lund handling all of them as a unit, it was not long before the shovels began to scrape on the bare rock that un- derlay the gravel at tide edge, and work swiftly back to the end of the U. The out- doors kitchen had been established on top of the promontory between the schooner and the beach, a primitive arrangement of big pots slung from tripods over fires kindled on a flat area that was partly sheltered from the sea and the prevailing winds by outcrops of weathered lava. (E00) .OO ml (E@)