him know.

"But after that carrier had gone, Weatherbee's letter kept worrying me. It wasn't like him to complain, yet he had written he was tired of the eternal winters; he couldn't stand those everlasting snow peaks sometimes, they got to crowding him so; they kept him awake when he needed sleep, threatening him. 'I've got to break away from them, Hollis,' he said, 'and get where it's warm once more; and when my blood begins to thaw, I'll show you I can make a go of things.' Then he reminded me of the land he owned down here on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The soil was the finest volcanic ash; the kind that grew the vineyards on Vesuvius, and he meant to plant it with grapes; with orchards, too, on the bench levels. All the tract needed was water, but there was a natural reservoir and spring on a certain high plateau that could be easily tapped with a flume."

Tisdale paused while his glance moved slowly, singling out those who had known Weatherbee. A great gentleness rested on his face, and when he went on, it crept like a caress through his voice. "Most of you have heard him talk about that irrigation scheme; some of you have seen those plans he used to-work on, long Alaska nights. It was his dream for years. He went north in the beginning just to accumulate capital enough to swing that project. But the more I studied that letter, the more confident I was he had stayed his limit; he was breaking, and he knew it. That was why he was so anxious to turn the Aurora over to me and get to the States. Finally I decided to go with the mail carrier and on to the mine. If Weatherbee was still there, as I believed, we would travel to Fairbanks together and take the Valdez trail out to the open harbor on Prince William Sound. I picked up a team of eight good huskies—the weather was clear with a moon in her second quarter—and I started light, cutting my stops short; but when I left Nome I had lost four days."

Hollis paused another interval, looking off again through the open door, while the far-sighted expression gathered in his eyes. It was as though his listeners also in that moment saw those white solitudes stretching limitless under the Arctic night.

"I never caught up with that carrier," he went on, "and the messenger he sent on broke trail for me all the way to the Aurora. I met him on his return trip, thirty hours out from the mine. But he had found Weatherbee there, and had a deed for me which David had asked him to see recorded and forwarded to me at Nome. It was a relief to hear he had been able to attend to these business matters, but I wondered why he had not brought the deed himself, since he must come that way to strike the Fairbanks trail, and why the man had not waited to travel with him. Then he told me Weatherbee had decided to use the route I had sketched in my letter. The messenger had tried to dissuade him; he had reminded him there were no road-houses, and that the traces left by my party must have been wiped out by the winter snows. But Weatherbee argued that the new route would shorten the distance to open tide-water hundreds of miles; that his nearest neighbors were in that direction, fifty miles to the south; and they would let him have dogs. Then, when he struck the Susitna Valley, he would have miles of railroad bed to ease the last stage. So, at the time the messenger left the Aurora, Weatherbee started south on his long trek to Rainy Pass. He was mushing afoot, with Tyee pulling the sled. Some of you must remember that big husky with a strain of St. Bernard he used to drive on the Tanana."

"My, yes," piped little Banks, and his eyes scintillated like chippings of blue glacier ice. "Likely I do remember Tyee. Dave picked him up that same trip he set me on my feet. He found him left to starve on the trail with a broken leg. And he camped right there, pitched his tent for a hospital, and went to whittling splints out of a piece of willow to set that bone. 'I am sorry to keep you waiting,' he says to me, 'but he is a mighty good dog. He would have done his level best to see the man who deserted him through.' And he would. I'd bank my money on old Tyee."

Tisdale nodded slowly. "But my chance to overtake David was before he secured that team fifty miles on. And I pushed my dogs too hard. When I reached the Aurora, they were nearly done for. I was forced to rest them a day. That gave me time to look into Weatherbee's work. I found that the creek where he had made his discovery ran through a deep and narrow canyon, and it was clear to me that the boxed channel, which was frozen solid then, was fed during the short summer by a small glacier at the top of the gorge. To turn the high water from his placer, he had made a bore of nearly one thousand feet and practically through rock. I followed a bucket tramway he had rigged to lift the dump and found a primitive lighting-plant underground. The whole tunnel was completed, with the exception of a thin wall left to safeguard against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few days at long intervals, when the two miners had exchanged their labor for some engineering, he had made his improvements alone, single-handed. And most of that flume was constructed in those slow months he waited to hear from me."

Tisdale paused, and again his glance sought the faces of those who had known David Weatherbee. But all the Circle was strung responsive. Those who never had known Weatherbee understood the terrible conditions he had braved; the body-wracking toil underground; the soul-breaking solitude; the crowding silence that months earlier he had felt the necessity to escape. In that picked company, the latent force in each acknowledged the iron courage of the man; but it was Tisdale's magnetic personality, the unstudied play of expression in his rugged face, the undercurrent of emotion quickening through infinite tones of his voice, that plumbed the depths and in every listener struck the dominant chord. And, too, these men had bridged subconsciously those vast distances between Tisdale's start from Nome in clear weather, "with a moon in her second quarter," and that stop at the deserted mine, when his dogs—powerful huskies, part wolf, since they were bred in the Seward Peninsula—"were nearly done for." Long and inevitable periods of dark there had been; perils of white blizzard, of black frost. They had run familiarly the whole gamut of hardship and danger he himself must have faced single-handed; and while full measure was accorded Weatherbee, the greater tribute passed silently, unsought, to the man who had traveled so far and so fast to rescue him.

"It ought to have been me," exclaimed Lucky Banks at last in his high treble. "I was just down in the Iditarod country, less than three hundred miles. I ought to have run up once in awhile to see how he was getting along. But I never thought of Dave's needing help himself, and nobody told me he was around. I'd ought to have kept track of him, though; it was up to me. But go on, Hollis; go on. I bet you made up that day you lost at the mine. My, yes, I bet you broke the record hitting that fifty-mile camp."

Tisdale nodded, and for an instant the humor played lightly at the corners of his eyes. "It took me just seven hours with an up-grade the last twenty miles. You see, I had Weatherbee to break trail. He rested a night at the camp and lost about three hours more, while they hunted a missing husky to make up his team. Still he pushed out with nearly eighteen hours start and four fresh dogs, with Tyee pulling a strong lead; while I