Tisdale frowned.  “There is where you make your mistake.  Weatherbee persisted as he did, in the face of defeat, for her sake.”

Foster laughed mirthlessly.  “The proofs are otherwise.  Look at things, once, from her side,” he broke out.  “Think what it means to her to see you realizing, from a few hundred dollars you could easily spare, this big fortune.  I know you’ve been generous, but after all, of what benefit to her is a bequest in your will, when now she has absolutely nothing but that hole in the Columbia desert?  Face it, be reasonable; you always have been in every way but this.  I don’t see how you can be so hard, knowing her now as you do.”

Tisdale turned to the window.  “I have not been as hard as you think,” he said.  “But it was necessary, in order to carry out Weatherbee’s plans, to—­ do as I did.”

“That’s the trouble.”  Foster rose from his chair and went a few steps nearer Tisdale.  “You are the sanest man in the world in every way but one.  But you can’t think straight when it comes to Weatherbee.  There is where the north got its hold on you.  Can’t you see it?  Look at it through my eyes, or any one’s.  You did for David Weatherbee what one man in a thousand might have done.  And you’ve interested Lucky Banks in that reclamation project; you’ve gone on yourself with his developments at the Aurora.  But there’s one thing you’ve lost sight of—­justice to Beatriz Weatherbee.  You’ve done your best for him, but he is dead.  Hollis, old man, I tell you he is dead.  And she is living.  You have sent her, the proudest, sweetest woman on God’s earth, to brave out her life in that sage-brush wilderness.  Can’t you see you owe something to her?”

Tisdale did not reply.  But presently he went over to his safe and took out the two documents that were fastened together.  This time it was the will he returned to its place; the other paper he brought to Foster.  “I am going to apologize for my estimate of Mrs. Weatherbee the night you sailed north,” he said.  “My judgment then, before I had seen her, was unfair; you were right.  But I could hardly have done differently in any case.  There was danger that she would dispose of a half interest in the Aurora at once, at any low price Frederic Morganstein might name.  And you know the syndicate’s methods.  I did not want a Morganstein partnership.  But, later, at the time I had my will drawn, I saw this way.”

Foster took the document, but he did not read it immediately; he stood looking at Tisdale.  “So you too were afraid of him.  But I knew nothing about Lucky Banks’ option.  It worried me, those endless nights up there in the Iditarod, to think that in her extremity she might marry Frederic Morganstein.  There was a debt that pressed her.  Did you know about that?”

“Yes.  She called it a ‘debt of honor.’”

“And you believed, as I did, that it was a direct loan to cover personal expenses.  After I came home, I found out she borrowed the money originally of Miss Morganstein, to endow a bed in the children’s hospital.  Think of it!  And Mrs. Feversham, who took it off her sister’s hands, transferred the note to Morganstein.”