“Yes, he wasted the best weeks of the season in Seward, waiting for his wife.  But she never came.  She wrote she had changed her mind.  He showed me that letter one night at the close of the season when he stopped at my camp on his way back to the Tanana.  It was short but long enough to remind him there were accounts pressing; one particularly that she called a ’debt of honor.’  She hadn’t specified, but I guessed directly she had been accepting loans from her friends, and I saw it was that that had worried him.  To raise the necessary money, he had been obliged to realize on the new placer.  His partner had been waiting to go in to the claim with him, and Weatherbee’s sudden offer to sell made the mining man suspicious.  He refused to buy at any price.  Then David found an old prospector whom he had once befriended and made a deal with him.  It was five hundred dollars down, and two thousand out of the first year’s clean-up.  And he sent all of the ready money to her and started in to make a new stake below Discovery.  But the inevitable stampede had followed on the Nevada man’s heels, and the strike turned out small.

“It was one of those rich pockets we find sometimes along a glacier that make fortunes for the first men, while the rank and file pan out defeat and disappointment.  There was the quartz body above, stringers and veins of it reaching through the graywackes and slate, but to handle it Weatherbee must set up a stamp-mill; and only a line of pack-mules from the Andes, and another line of steamships could transport the ore to the nearest smelter, on Puget Sound.  So—­he took up the long trek northward again, to the Tanana.  Think of it!  The irony of it!”

Tisdale rose and turned on the step to look down at her.  The light from the lantern intensified the furrows between his brooding eyes.  “And think what it meant to Weatherbee to have seen, as he had, day after day, hour after hour, the heart of another man’s wife laid bare, while to his own he himself was simply a source of revenue.”

Miss Armitage too rose and stood meeting his look.  Her lip trembled a little, but the blue lights flamed in her eyes.  “You believe that,” she said, and her voice dropped into an unexpected note.  “You believe he threw away that rich discovery for the few hundreds of dollars he sent his wife; but I know—­she was told—­differently.  She thought he was glad to—­escape—­ at so small a price.  He wrote he was glad she had reconsidered that trip; Alaska was no place for her.”

“Madam,” Tisdale remonstrated softly, “you couldn’t judge David Weatherbee literally by his letters.  If you had ever felt his personality, you would have caught the undercurrent, deep and strong, sweeping between the lines.  It wasn’t himself that counted; it was what was best for her.  You couldn’t estimate him by other men; he stood, like your white mountain, alone above the crowd.  And he set a pedestal higher than himself and raised