the tree. But my time belonged to the Government. I had a
party in the field, and the Alaska season is short. It fell to David
Weatherbee to see her down to Seward."

"To David Weatherbee?" Miss Armitage started. Protest fluctuated with the
surprise in her voice. "But I see, I see!" and she settled back in her
seat. "You sent him word. He had known her previously."

"No. When I left him early in the spring, he intended to prospect down the
headwaters of the Susitna, you remember, and I was carrying my surveys
back from the lower valley. We were working toward each other, and I
expected to meet him any day. In fact, I had mail for him at my camp that
had come by way of Seward, so I hardly was surprised the next morning,
when I made the last turn below the glacier with my horse to see old
Weatherbee coming over the ice-bridge.

"He had made a discovery at the source of that little tributary, where the
erosion of the glacier had opened a rich vein, and on following the stream
through graywackes and slate to the first gravelled fissure, he had found
the storage plant for his placer gold. He was on his way out to have the
claim recorded and get supplies and mail when he heard the baying setter
and, rounding the mouth of the pocket, saw the camp and the dead
prospector. Afterwards, when he had talked with the woman waiting down the
canyon, he asked to see her husband's poke and compared the gold with the
sample he had panned. It was the same, coarse and rough, with little
scraps of quartz clinging to the bigger flakes sometimes, and he insisted
the strike was Barbour's. He tried to persuade her to make the entry, but
she refused, and finally they compromised with a partnership."

"So they were partners." Miss Armitage paused, then went on with a touch
of frostiness: "And they traveled those miles of wilderness alone, for
days together, out to the coast."

"Yes." Tisdale's glance, coming back, challenged hers. "Sometimes the
wilderness enforces a social code of her own. Miss Armitage,"--his voice
vibrated softly,--"I wish you had known David Weatherbee. But imagine Sir
Galahad, that whitest knight of the whole Round Table, Sir Galahad on that
Alaska trail, to-day. And Weatherbee was doubly anxious to reach Seward.
There was a letter from his wife in that packet of mail I gave him. She
had written she was taking the opportunity to travel as far as Seward with
some friends, who were making the summer tour of the coast. But h