The spectator., 1922-03-21
CHAPTER XII. |.
My M ate.

Upul. litN tht liAiiC o-Siuptu beach that lay between two buttresses of the volcano and sloped sharply down to the sea. Twenty-one men, a lad and woman, they went at the deSpoiling of it with sort of obses- sion. led, rather than driven, by Lund, who worked among the rest of them like Hercules.
 The mems fancy estimate of mil lion dollars began speedily to seem small as the work progressed, system atically stripping the rocky floor of all
 it's shingle, foot by foot. and cubic yard by cubic yard cradling if in crude rockers, fiuming it, vaporzing the amalgam of gold and mercury, and adding pound after pound of virgin gold to the sacks in the schoon- CTS 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 | drifted here and there where it had | frozen into conglomerate. and explod- | ed 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 fuel could be spared was conserved for use under the boil CTS that melted ice to provide water for the cradles and fumes, and help to cook the meals that Tamada pre- pared outof doors for the workers. | Buckets of coffee, stews, and thick soups of peas and lentils. masses 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. | Through all of 1t 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 shrinkage, or compression, of his bulk, 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 I'll blast way out of this shore ice, if 1t comes to the worst. l saved out some dynamite on purpose"
 | With Lund handling all of the men as unit, It was not long before the shovcls began to scrape on the bare rock that underlay the gravel at tide edge, and work swiftly back to the end of the U. The outdoors kitchen had been established on top of the promontory between the schooner and the beach. a primitive arrange ment 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.
 | At dawn the men trooped from the schooner to be fed and warmed, and then they flung themselves at their task. The more they got out the more there was in IL for them. But Lund was their overlord their better, and they knew It. Only Deming worked with one hand the handle of the force bellows, or fed the fires. and sneered.
 On the fifteenth day. with the work better than half done. with more than ton of actual gold in colors. that ranged from flour dust to nuggets in the strongroom, the weather began to | change. IL misted continually. and Lund, rejoicing, prophesied the break ing up of the cold snap.
 By the eighteenth day a regular | Chinook was blowing. melting the sharper outlines of the icy crags and pinnacles, and providing streams of moisture that. in the nights now grad ually growing longer, glazed every yard of rock with peril.
 The men worked in muck with l their rubber sea-boots worn out by constant chafing, sweaters torn, the blades of their shovels reduced by the work demanded of them, the drills, | shortened by steady sharpening, gone like the spares flesh of the laborers, who, at last, began to show signs of quicker and quicker exhaustion with occasional mutterings of discontent, while Lund, intent upon cleaning of the rock as a dentist cleans crumbling tooth coaxed and cursed, blamed and praised and bullied, and did the actual work of three of them. Dead with fatigue. filled with food, drowsy from the liberal grog allow ance at the end of the day the men slept in torpor every night and showed less inclination to respond, though the end of their labors was al- most in sight.