“He had made a discovery at the source of that little tributary, where the erosion of the glacier had opened a rich vein, and on following the stream through graywackes and slate to the first gravelled fissure, he had found the storage plant for his placer gold.  He was on his way out to have the claim recorded and get supplies and mail when he heard the baying setter and, rounding the mouth of the pocket, saw the camp and the dead prospector.  Afterwards, when he had talked with the woman waiting down the canyon, he asked to see her husband’s poke and compared the gold with the sample he had panned.  It was the same, coarse and rough, with little scraps of quartz clinging to the bigger flakes sometimes, and he insisted the strike was Barbour’s.  He tried to persuade her to make the entry, but she refused, and finally they compromised with a partnership.”

“So they were partners.”  Miss Armitage paused, then went on with a touch of frostiness:  “And they traveled those miles of wilderness alone, for days together, out to the coast.”

“Yes.”  Tisdale’s glance, coming back, challenged hers.  “Sometimes the wilderness enforces a social code of her own.  Miss Armitage,”—­his voice vibrated softly,—­“I wish you had known David Weatherbee.  But imagine Sir Galahad, that whitest knight of the whole Round Table, Sir Galahad on that Alaska trail, to-day.  And Weatherbee was doubly anxious to reach Seward.  There was a letter from his wife in that packet of mail I gave him.  She had written she was taking the opportunity to travel as far as Seward with some friends, who were making the summer tour of the coast.  But he was ready to cut the trip into short and easy stages to see Mrs. Barbour through.  ‘It’s all right,’ he said at the start.  ’Leave it to me.  I am going to take this lady to my wife.’”

“And—­at Seward?” questioned Miss Armitage, breaking the pause.

“At Seward his wife failed him.  But he rented a snug cottage of some people going out to the States and had the good fortune to find a motherly woman, who knew something about nursing, to stay with Mrs. Barbour.  It was Christmas when her father arrived from Virginia to help her home, and it was spring before she was able to make the sea voyage as far as Seattle.”

“Expenses, in those new, frontier towns, are so impossible; I hope her father was able”—­she halted, then added hurriedly, flushing under Tisdale’s searching eyes, “but, of course, in any case, he reimbursed Mr. Weatherbee.”

“He did, you may be sure, if there was any need.  But you have forgotten that poke of Barbour’s.  There was dust enough to have carried her through even an Alaska winter; but an old Nevada miner, on the strength of that showing, paid her twenty thousand dollars outright for her interest in the claim.”

Miss Armitage drew a deep breath.  “And David Weatherbee, too?  He sold his share—­did he not—­and stayed on at Seward?”