business matters, but I wondered why he had not brought the deed himself, since he must come that way to strike the Fairbanks trail, and why the man had not waited to travel with him.  Then he told me Weatherbee had decided to use the route I had sketched in my letter.  The messenger had tried to dissuade him; he had reminded him there were no road-houses, and that the traces left by my party must have been wiped out by the winter snows.  But Weatherbee argued that the new route would shorten the distance to open tide-water hundreds of miles; that his nearest neighbors were in that direction, fifty miles to the south; and they would let him have dogs.  Then, when he struck the Susitna Valley, he would have miles of railroad bed to ease the last stage.  So, at the time the messenger left the Aurora, Weatherbee started south on his long trek to Rainy Pass.  He was mushing afoot, with Tyee pulling the sled.  Some of you must remember that big husky with a strain of St. Bernard he used to drive on the Tanana.”

“My, yes,” piped little Banks, and his eyes scintillated like chippings of blue glacier ice.  “Likely I do remember Tyee.  Dave picked him up that same trip he set me on my feet.  He found him left to starve on the trail with a broken leg.  And he camped right there, pitched his tent for a hospital, and went to whittling splints out of a piece of willow to set that bone.  ‘I am sorry to keep you waiting,’ he says to me, ’but he is a mighty good dog.  He would have done his level best to see the man who deserted him through.’  And he would.  I’d bank my money on old Tyee.”

Tisdale nodded slowly.  “But my chance to overtake David was before he secured that team fifty miles on.  And I pushed my dogs too hard.  When I reached the Aurora, they were nearly done for.  I was forced to rest them a day.  That gave me time to look into Weatherbee’s work.  I found that the creek where he had made his discovery ran through a deep and narrow canyon, and it was clear to me that the boxed channel, which was frozen solid then, was fed during the short summer by a small glacier at the top of the gorge.  To turn the high water from his placer, he had made a bore of nearly one thousand feet and practically through rock.  I followed a bucket tramway he had rigged to lift the dump and found a primitive lighting-plant underground.  The whole tunnel was completed, with the exception of a thin wall left to safeguard against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume.  You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road.  To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand.  And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished.  Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few days at long intervals, when the two miners had exchanged their labor for some engineering, he had made his improvements alone, single-handed.  And most of that flume was constructed in those slow months he waited to hear from me.”