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."

Tisdale paused, and again his glance sought the faces of those who had
known David Weatherbee. But all the Circle was strung responsive. Those
who never had known Weatherbee understood the terrible conditions he had
braved; the body-wracking toil underground; the soul-breaking solitude;
the crowding silence that months earlier he had felt the necessity to
escape. In that picked company, the latent force in each acknowledged the
iron courage of the man; but it was Tisdale's magnetic personality, the
unstudied play of expression in his rugged face, the undercurrent of
emotion quickening through infinite tones of his voice, that plumbed the
depths and in every listener struck the dominant chord. And, too, these
men had bridged subconsciously those vast distances between Tisdale's
s