ou. You'll have a
search-party out after you some dark morning, and you know it won't
be pleasant to be lost in the snows up that canyon."

"But I go home, night-time," she persisted, and that ended the
controversy.

But the catastrophe he predicted was inevitable. Morning after
morning he would open the door of the shack he occupied with the
other officials, and, looking up the white wastes through the
gray-blue dawn, he would watch the distances with an anxiety that
meant more than a consideration for his breakfast. The woman
interested him. She was so silent, so capable, so stubborn. What
was behind all this strength of character? What had given that
depth of mournfulness to her eyes? Often he had surprised her
watching him, with an odd longing in her face; it was something of
the expression he could remember his mother wore when she looked
at him long, long ago. It was a vague, haunting look that always
brought back the one great tragedy of his life--a tragedy he was
even now working night and day at his chosen profession to obliterate
from his memory, lest he should be forever unmanned--forever a prey
to melancholy.

He was still a young man, but when little more than a boy he had
married, and for two years was transcendently happy. Then came the
cry of "Kootenay Gold" ringing throughout Canada--of the untold
wealth of Kootenay mines. Like thousands of others he followed the
beckoning of that yellow finger, taking his young wife and baby
daughter West with him. The little town of Nelson, crouching on its
beautiful hills, its feet laved by the waters of Kootenay Lake, was
then in its first robust, active infancy. Here he settled, going
out alone on long prospecting expeditions; sometimes he was away a
week, sometimes a month, with the lure of the gold forever in his
veins, but the laughter of his child, the love of his wife, forever
in his heart. Then--the day of that awful home-coming! For three
weeks the fascination of searching for the golden pay-streak had
held him in the mountains. No one could find him when it happened,
and now all they could tell him was the story of an upturned canoe
found drifting on the lake, of a woman's light summer shawl caught
in the thwarts, of a child's little silken bonnet washed ashore.
[Fact.] The great-hearted men of the West had done their utmost
in the search that followed. Miners, missionaries, prospectors,
Indians, settlers, gamblers, outlaws, had one and all turned out,