Bill Peck is a well-meaning fellow. He started to go to Yale, but was always having awful hangovers and not showing up at his classes, and on trains he would get into card games with people who won all his money. So his father, a wealthy drug manufacturer, sent him out West to a ranch. At the ranch, Bill read books about lost gold mines and the buried treasures of the Spanish; his allowance had by that time been cut down, and he decided to go out and search for them. He wears a pistol slung under his arm and an old hat slouched over his eyes, and he goes for long walks in the woods with a pickaxe over his shoulder. One day he came back all excited and said that he had got into a cave which was all frozen full of ice and that in the ice were two American soldiers in a perfect state of preservation. But when people went out with him to look for the cave, he couldn't find the way again, and he never succeeded in getting back there.