So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl’s photograph pasted on the inside of the case.  Corry Hutchinson gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.

“Mabel is her name,” Pentfield went on.  “And it’s just as well you should know how to find the house.  Soon as you strike ’Frisco, take a cab, and just say, ’Holmes’s place, Myrdon Avenue’—­I doubt if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary.  The cabby’ll know where Judge Holmes lives.

“And say,” Pentfield continued, after a pause, “it won’t be a bad idea for you to get me a few little things which a—­er—­”

“A married man should have in his business,” Hutchinson blurted out with a grin.

Pentfield grinned back.

“Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such things.  And you might get a good set of china.  You know it’ll come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing.  You can freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea.  And, I say, what’s the matter with a piano?”

Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily.  His reluctance had vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.

“By Jove!  Lawrence,” he said at the conclusion of the council, as they both rose to their feet, “I’ll bring back that girl of yours in style.  I’ll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother’ll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I’ve forgotten.  And I’ll forget damn little, I can tell you.”

The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world.  Pentfield went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter.  There was work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in the work.  Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine.  It was a grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.  Each log was hand-hewed and squared—­an expensive whim when the axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.

So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, “And oh, my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!” Also, he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring.  Another whim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill.  It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door.  No one entered save himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light.