e was
ready to cut the trip into short and easy stages to see Mrs. Barbour
through. 'It's all right,' he said at the start. 'Leave it to me. I am
going to take this lady to my wife.'"

"And--at Seward?" questioned Miss Armitage, breaking the pause.

"At Seward his wife failed him. But he rented a snug cottage of some
people going out to the States and had the good fortune to find a motherly
woman, who knew something about nursing, to stay with Mrs. Barbour. It was
Christmas when her father arrived from Virginia to help her home, and it
was spring before she was able to make the sea voyage as far as Seattle."

"Expenses, in those new, frontier towns, are so impossible; I hope her
father was able"--she halted, then added hurriedly, flushing under
Tisdale's searching eyes, "but, of course, in any case, he reimbursed Mr.
Weatherbee."

"He did, you may be sure, if there was any need. But you have forgotten
that poke of Barbour's. There was dust enough to have carried her through
even an Alaska winter; but an old Nevada miner, on the strength of that
showing, paid her twenty thousand dollars outright for her interest in the
claim."

Miss Armitage drew a deep breath. "And David Weatherbee, too? He sold his
share--did he not--and stayed on at Seward?"

"Yes, he wasted the best weeks of the season in Seward, waiting for his
wife. But she never came. She wrote she had changed her mind. He showed me
that letter one night at the close of the season when he stopped at my
camp on his way back to the Tanana. It was short but long enough to remind
him there were accounts pressing; one particularly that she called a 'debt
of honor.' She hadn't specified, but I guessed directly she had been
accepting loans from her friends, and I saw it was that that had worried
him. To raise the necessary money, he had been obliged to realize on the
new placer. His partner had been waiting to go in to the claim with him,
and Weatherbee's sudden offer to sell made the mining man suspicious. He
refused to buy at any price. Then David found an old prospector whom he
had once befriended and made a deal with him. It was five hundred dollars
down, and two thousand out of the first year's clean-up. And he sent all
of the ready money to her and started in to make a new stake below
Discovery. But the inevitable stampede had followed on the Nevada man's
heels, and the strike turned out small.

"It was one of those rich pockets we find sometimes along a gla