a spark of soul.

He had stopped near the table, and his glance fell on the package in the ring of light from the shaded lamp. After a moment he lifted it and, drawing up a chair, seated himself and removed the wrapper. It covered a tin box such as he was accustomed to use in the wilderness for the protection and portage of field notes and maps. He raised the lid and took from the top a heavy paper, which he unfolded and spread before him. It was Weatherbee's landscape plan, traced with the skill of a draughtsman and showing plainly the contour of the tract in eastern Washington and his method of reclamation. The land included a deep pocket set between spurs of the Cascade Mountains. The ridges and peaks above it had an altitude of from one to six thousand feet. He found the spring, marked high in a depressed shoulder, and followed the line of flume drawn from it down to a natural dry basin at the top of the pocket. A dam was set in the lower rim of this reservoir and, reaching from it, a canal was sketched in, feeding cross ditches, distributing spillways to the orchards that covered the slopes and levels below. Finally he traced the roadway up through the avenues between the trees, over the bench, to the house that commanded the valley. The mission walls, the inside court, the roomy, vine-grown portico, all the detail of foliage here had been elaborated skilfully, with the touch of an artist. The habitation stood out the central feature of the picture and, as a good etching will, assumed a certain personality.

How fond David would have been of a home,—a home and children! Tisdale folded the plan and sat holding it absently in his hands. His mind ran back from this final, elaborated copy to the first rough draft Weatherbee had shown him one night at the beginning of that interminable winter they had passed together in the Alaska solitudes. He had watched the drawing and the project grow. But afterwards, when he had taken up geological work again, they had met only at long intervals; at times he had lost all trace of Weatherbee, and he had not realized the scheme had such a hold. Still, he should have understood; he should have had at least a suspicion before that letter reached him at Nome. And even then he had been blind. With that written proof in his hands, he had failed to grasp its meaning. The tragedy! the shame of it! That he should have hesitated,—thrown away four days.

He looked off once more to the harbor, and his eyes gathered their far-sighted expression, as though they went seeking that white trail through the solitudes stretching limitless under the cold Arctic night. His face hardened. When finally the features stirred, disturbed by forces far down, he had come to that make-believe orchard of spruce twigs.

After a while he folded the drawing to put it away, but as his glance fell on the contents of the box, he laid the plan on the table to take up the miner's poke tucked in a corner made by a packet of letters, and drew out Weatherbee's watch. It was valuable but the large monogram deeply engraved on the gold case may have made it unnegotiable. That probably was why David never had parted with it. Tisdale wound it, and set the hands. The action seemed suddenly to bring Weatherbee close. He felt his splendid personality there beside him, as he used to feel it still nights up under the near Yukon stars. It was as though he was back to one night, the last on a long trail, when they were about to part company. He had been urging him to come out with him to the States, but Weatherbee had as steadily refused. "Not yet," he persisted. "Not until I have something to show." And again: "No, Hollis, don't ask me to throw away all these years. I have the experience now, and I've got to make good." Then he spoke of his wife— for an instant Tisdale seemed to see him once more, bending to hold his open watch so that the light of the camp-fire played on her picture set in the lower rim. "You see Alaska is no place for a woman like her," he said, "but she is worth waiting for and working for. You ought to understand, Hollis, how the thought of her buoys me through."

But it was a long time to remember a picture seen only by the flicker of a camp-fire and starshine, and the woman of Tisdale's imagination clouded out the face he tried to recall. "Still Weatherbee was so sensitive, so fine," he argued with himself. "A woman must have possessed more than a beautiful body to have become the center of his life. She must, at the start, have possessed some capacity of feeling."

He put his thumb on the spring to open the lower case, but the image so clearly fixed in his mind stayed the impulse. "What is the use?" he exclaimed, and thrusting the watch back into the bag, quickly tied the string. "I don't want to see you. I don't want to know you," and he added, pushing the poke into its place and closing the box; "The facts are all against you."