n setter there that reminded me of
her. Her dog had the same points, though he had been better trained." He
paused briefly, then said: "She was both. She was like that small, white
flower which grows in the shelter of the Alaska woods--sweet and modest
and frail looking--yet she was the bravest woman and the strongest when it
came to endurance I ever knew."

"It happened, of course, in Alaska," Miss Armitage ventured, breaking the
pause. "You knew her there?"

"Yes, it was in Alaska and about five years ago. The season I gave up
getting rich in a hurry and went back to geological work. I had spent the
winter on the Tanana with David Weatherbee. We had staked a promising
placer, and we were ready to begin sluicing with the first spring thaw,
when he sold his interest unexpectedly to meet an obligation down in the
States. That nettled me, and I sold out my own share to the same men and
accepted a position with the department, who had written to ask me to take
charge of a party working above Seward. Weatherbee started with me, but I
left him to prospect along the headwaters of the Susitna. My surveys kept
me in the neighborhood of Turnagain Arm until midsummer, when I moved camp
up the river to the mouth of an unexplored tributary. It was the kind of
stream to lure a prospector or a sportsman, clear, rapid, broken by
riffles and sand-bars, while the grassy shores looked favorable for elk or
caribou. To bridge the delay while the last pack-horses straggled in and
the men were busy pitching tents and putting things into shape, I decided
to go on a short hunting trip. I traveled light, with only a single
blanket rolled compactly for my shoulder strap, in case the short night
should overtake me, with a generous lunch that Sandy, the cook, had
supplied, but at the end of two hours' steady tramping I had sighted
nothing. I had reached a wooded ravine and a snow-peak, apparently the
source of the stream, closed the top of the gorge. It was the heart of the
wilderness, over a hundred miles from a settlement and off the track of
road-houses, but a few rods on I came upon the flume and dump of a placer
mine. The miner's cabin stood a little farther up the bank under a clump
of spruce, but the place seemed abandoned. Then I noticed some berry
bushes near the sluice had been lately snapped off, where some heavy
animal had pushed through, and a moment later, in the moist soil at a
small spillway, I picked up the trail of a large bear.