final worth.

"There ain't no horse he could have," said Lufkins, making ready
himself to drive his team of twenty animals through wind and snow to
the mill, "and even if we had a mule, old Jim would never start. It's
comin' on to snow again to-night, and that's too much for Jim."

Bone was not at once discouraged, but in truth he believed, with all
the others, that Jim would no more leave the camp to go forth and
breast the oncoming snow to search the mountains for a shrub than he
would fetch a tree for the Christmas celebration or work good and hard
at his claim.

The bar-keep found no horse. He expected none to be offered, and felt
his labors were wasted. The afternoon was well advanced when he came
again to the home of Miss Doc, where Jim was sitting by the bed whereon
the little wanderer was burning out his life.

"Jim," he said, in his way of bluntness, "there ain't no horse you can
git, but I warned you 'bout the claim, and I don't want to see you lose
it, all fer nothin'."

"He's worse," said Jim, his eyes wildly blazing with love for the
fatherless, motherless little man. "If only I had the resolution,
Bone, I'd go and git that shrub on foot."

"You'd lose yer claim," said Bone.

Miss Doc came out to the door where they stood. She was wringing her
hands.

"Jim," she said, "if you think you kin, anyhow, git that Injun stuff,
why don't you go and git it?"

Jim looked at her fixedly. Not before had he known that she felt the
case to be so nearly hopeless. Despair took a grip on his vitals. A
something of sympathy leaped from the woman's heart to his--a something
common to them both--in the yearning that a helpless child had stirred.

"I'll get my hat and go," he said, and he went in the house, to appear
almost instantly, putting on the battered hat, but clothed far too
thinly for the rigors of the weather.

"But, Jim, it's beginning to snow, right now," objected Bone.

"I may get back before it's dark," old Jim replied.

"I can see you're goin' to lose the claim," insisted Bone.

"I'm goin' to git that shrub!" said Jim. "I won't come back till I git
that shrub."

He started off through the gate at the back of the house, his long,
lank figure darkly cut against the background of the white that lay
upon the slope. A flurry of blinding snow came suddenly flying on the
wind. It wrapped him all about and hid him in its fury, and when the
calmer falling of the flakes commenced he had disap