ching at the chance, 'do you think Jerry can make up
for the delay, if I do? I will travel my best, I promise you.' And she led
the way, picking up the faint trail and setting a pace that I knew must
soon tire her, while the dog brushed by us, bounding ahead and rushing
back and expressing his satisfaction in all sorts of manoeuvers.

"In a little while, above the timber--the tree line is low on those Alaska
mountainsides--we came to a broad, grassy bog set deep between two spurs,
and she was forced to give me the lead. Then the canyon walls grew
steeper, lifting into rugged knobs. Sometimes I lost the prospector's
trail in a rock-choked torrent and picked it up again, where it hung like
a thin ribbon on a heather-grown slope; but it never wound or doubled if
there was foothold ahead. It led up stairs of graywacke, along the brink
of slaty cliffs that dropped sheer, hundreds of feet to the stream below.
Still she kept on pluckily, and whenever I turned to help her, I found her
there at my elbow, ready. Now and then in breadths of level, where it was
possible to walk abreast, we talked a little, but most of the distance was
covered in silence. I felt more and more sorry for her. She was so eager,
patient, watchful, forever scanning the pitches on either side. And if the
setter made a sudden break, scenting a bare perhaps, or starting a
ptarmigan, she always stopped, waiting with a light in her face; and when
he jogged back to her heels, the expectation settled into patience again.

"Finally we came to a rill where I urged her to rest; and when I had
spread my blanket on a boulder, she took the seat, leaning comfortably
against a higher rock, and watched me while I opened the tin box in which
Sandy had stored my lunch. She told me my cook made a good sandwich and
knew how to fry a bird Southern fashion. Then she spoke of the Virginia
town where she had lived before her marriage. The trip west had been her
wedding journey, and her husband, who was an architect, had intended to
open an office in a new town on Puget Sound, but at Seattle he caught the
Alaska fever.

"'The future looked very certain and brilliant then,' she said, with her
smile, 'but as long as I have my husband, nothing else counts. I could
live out my life, be happy here in this wilderness, anywhere, with him. If
I could only have him back--as he used to be.'"

Tisdale's voice softened, vibrating gently, so that the pathos of it all
must have impressed th