special messenger on from the nearest post.  In the letter I wrote to explain my delay, I sketched a plan of my summer’s work and told him how sorry I was I had missed seeing him while the party was camped below Rainy Pass.  Though I couldn’t have spared the time to go to the Aurora, he might have found me, had I sent an Indian with word.  It was the first time I had gone through his orbit without letting him know.

“But after that carrier had gone, Weatherbee’s letter kept worrying me.  It wasn’t like him to complain, yet he had written he was tired of the eternal winters; he couldn’t stand those everlasting snow peaks sometimes, they got to crowding him so; they kept him awake when he needed sleep, threatening him.  ‘I’ve got to break away from them, Hollis,’ he said, ’and get where it’s warm once more; and when my blood begins to thaw, I’ll show you I can make a go of things.’  Then he reminded me of the land he owned down here on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains.  The soil was the finest volcanic ash; the kind that grew the vineyards on Vesuvius, and he meant to plant it with grapes; with orchards, too, on the bench levels.  All the tract needed was water, but there was a natural reservoir and spring on a certain high plateau that could be easily tapped with a flume.”

Tisdale paused while his glance moved slowly, singling out those who had known Weatherbee.  A great gentleness rested on his face, and when he went on, it crept like a caress through his voice.  “Most of you have heard him talk about that irrigation scheme; some of you have seen those plans he used to-work on, long Alaska nights.  It was his dream for years.  He went north in the beginning just to accumulate capital enough to swing that project.  But the more I studied that letter, the more confident I was he had stayed his limit; he was breaking, and he knew it.  That was why he was so anxious to turn the Aurora over to me and get to the States.  Finally I decided to go with the mail carrier and on to the mine.  If Weatherbee was still there, as I believed, we would travel to Fairbanks together and take the Valdez trail out to the open harbor on Prince William Sound.  I picked up a team of eight good huskies—­the weather was clear with a moon in her second quarter—­and I started light, cutting my stops short; but when I left Nome I had lost four days.”

Hollis paused another interval, looking off again through the open door, while the far-sighted expression gathered in his eyes.  It was as though his listeners also in that moment saw those white solitudes stretching limitless under the Arctic night.

“I never caught up with that carrier,” he went on, “and the messenger he sent on broke trail for me all the way to the Aurora.  I met him on his return trip, thirty hours out from the mine.  But he had found Weatherbee there, and had a deed for me which David had asked him to see recorded and forwarded to me at Nome.  It was a relief to hear he had been able to attend to these