the setter, then her glance moved back
incredulously to me. 'Then what excites Jerry?' she asked.

"'Why,' I hurried to answer, 'just another bunch, of ptarmigan, probably.
But while you are resting here, I will go over into that pocket to satisfy
him.'

"The setter, content with my company, ran ahead, and I followed him across
the ice-bridge. The pocket was thickly strewn with broken rock, but at the
upper end there was a clear space grown with heather. And it was there, as
I feared, between a bluff and a solitary thumb-shaped boulder that the dog
had found his master."

Tisdale paused, looking off again with clouding brows to the stormy
heights. Eastward the moon in a clear sky threw a soft illumination on the
desert. The cry of the cougar had ceased. The electrical display was less
brilliant; it seemed farther off. Miss Armitage moved a little and waited,
watching his face.

"But of course," she ventured at last, "you mixed another draught from
your emergency flask. The stimulant saved his life."

"No." Tisdale's glance came slowly back. "He was beyond any help. A square
of canvas was set obliquely on the glacier side, and that and the blanket
which covered him proved the place was his camp; but the only traces of
food were a few cracker or bread crumbs in a trap made of twigs, and a
marmot skin and a bunch of ptarmigan feathers to show the primitive
contrivance had worked. There was no wood in the neighborhood, but the
ashes of a small fire showed he must have carried fuel from the belt of
spruce half-way down the gorge. If he had made such a trip and not gone on
to the cabin, it clearly proved his mental condition. Still in the end
there had been a glimmer of light, for he had torn a leaf from his
notebook and written first his wife's name and then a line, out of which I
was only able to pick the words 'give' and 'help' and 'States.' Evidently
he had tried to put the paper into his poke, which had dropped, untied,
from his hand with the pencil he had used. The sack was nearly full; it
had fallen upright in a fold of the blanket, so only a little of the gold,
which was very coarse and rough and bright, had spilled. I made all this
inventory almost at a glance, and saw directly he had left his pan and
shovel in the gravels of a stream that cascaded over the wall and through
the pocket to join the creek below the glacier. Then it came over me that
I must keep the truth from her until she was safely back at the ca