So came Lucky Banks’ hour.  He saw this woman who had been fond of pretty clothes, who had once worn them but was now reduced to a single frock of coarse denim, turn from the fine outfit before it was even displayed; waiting, with a wondrously comforting solicitude he never had suspected in the girl whom he had left in Oregon, to hear first that miserable story of the trail.  He told it briefly, but with the vividness of one whose words are coined straight from the crucible of bitter experience, and while she listened, her heart shone in her passionate eyes.  “What if it had happened,” she broke out at last.  “If it had, Johnny, it would have been my fault.  I drove you into going up there.  I’m responsible for this hand.  I—­I couldn’t have stood worse than that.”

The little man beamed.  “Is that so, Annabel?  Then I’m mighty glad Weatherbee followed that stampede.  Nobody else would have seen my hand sticking up through the snow and stopped to dig me out.  Unless—­” he added thoughtfully, “it was Hollis Tisdale.  Yes, likely Hollis would.  He was the only man in Alaska fit to be Dave’s running mate.”

“Do you mean that surveyor?” she asked.

Banks nodded.

“I thought so,” she said with satisfaction.  “Dad taught me to size people up on sight.  He could tell the first minute he saw a man’s face whether he was good for a bill of groceries or not; and I knew that surveyor was straight.  I bet he knew you was in Seattle when he got me to write.  But I wish I could have a look at the other one.  He must be—­great.”

Banks nodded again.  “He was,” he answered huskily.  “He was.  But he’s made his last trip.  I wasn’t three hundred miles off, but I never thought of Dave Weatherbee’s needing help; it took Tisdale, clear off in Nome, over a thousand miles, to sense something was wrong.  But he started to mush it, alone with his huskies, to the Iditarod and on to the Aurora, Dave’s mine.  You don’t know anything about that winter trail, Annabel.  It means from twenty to fifty below, with the wind swooping out of every canyon, cross-cutting like knives, and not the sign of a road-house in days, in weeks sometimes.  But he made it,”—­Banks’ voice reached high pitch—­“He beat the records, my, yes.”

“And something was wrong?” asked Annabel, breaking the pause.

Banks nodded again.  “You remember that sheepman down in Oregon they brought in from the range.  The one that ripped up his comforter that night at the hotel and set the wool in little rolls around the floor; thought he was tending sheep?  Well, that’s what was happening.  And Hollis was two days late.  Dave had started for the coast; not the regular way to Fairbanks and out by stage to Valdez, but a new route through the Alaska Range to strike the Susitna and on to Seward.  And he had fresh dogs.  He was through Rainy Pass when Tisdale began to catch up.”

“He did catch up?” Annabel questioned again hurriedly.