The date was the end of August, of the same year David had written that final letter which reached him the following spring at Nome.  But the date on the open page of the notebook was the fifteenth of January of that winter, his last at the Aurora mine.

“Last night I dreamed of Beatriz,” it began.  “I thought I went down to Seward to meet her, and when the steamer came, I saw her standing on the forward deck, waving her hand gaily and smiling just as she did that day I left her at Seattle so long ago.  Then, as the ship came alongside the dock, and she walked down the gangway, and I took her hand to kiss her, her face suddenly changed.  She was not Beatriz; she was Lilias.  My God, if it had been Lilias!  Why, she would be here now, she and little Bee, filling this frozen cabin with summer.”

The final date was two months later.

“Still snowing,” it ran.  “Snowing.  God, how I want to break away from this hole.  Get out somewhere, where men are alive and doing things.  Nothing is moving here but the snow and those two black buttes out there.  They keep crowding closer through the smother, watching everything I do.  I’ve warned them to keep back.  They must, or I’ll blow them off the face of the earth.  Oh, I’ll do it, if it takes all that’s left of the dynamite.  I won’t have them threatening Lilias when she comes.  She is coming; she said she would, unless I went out to the States.  And I can’t go; I haven’t heard from Tisdale.  I never have told her about those buttes.  It’s unusual; she might not believe it; she would worry and think, perhaps, I am growing like Barbour.  God!  Suppose I am.  Suppose she should come up here in this wilderness to find me a wreck like him.  She must not come.  I’ve got to prevent it.  But I’ve offered my half interest in the Aurora to Tisdale.  He will take it.  He never failed me yet.”

Tisdale closed the book and laid it down.  Furrows seamed his face, changing, re-forming, to the inner upheaval.  After awhile, he lifted Weatherbee’s watch from the desk and mechanically pressed the spring.  The lower case opened, but the picture he remembered was not there.  In its place was the face of the other child, his namesake, “Bee.”

Out in the patio the pool rippled ceaselessly; the fountain threw its silver ribbon of spray, and Beatriz waited, listening, with her eyes turned to the room she had left.  At last she heard his step.  It was the tread of a man whose decision was made.  She sank down on the curb of the basin near one of the palms.  Behind her an open door, creaking in the light wind, swung wide, and beyond it the upper flume stretched back to the natural reservoir where she had been imprisoned by the fallen pine tree.  His glance, as he crossed the court, moved from her through this door and back to her face.

“You were right,” he said.  “But it would have been different if David had known about his child.  His great heart was starved.”