hile with
maternal protectiveness they covered it, and she drew him back to the
broad arm of her chair. The defiance had gone out of her face; her eyes
were misty and tender. "You tell me what happened," she said.

So came Lucky Banks' hour. He saw this woman who had been fond of pretty
clothes, who had once worn them but was now reduced to a single frock of
coarse denim, turn from the fine outfit before it was even displayed;
waiting, with a wondrously comforting solicitude he never had suspected in
the girl whom he had left in Oregon, to hear first that miserable story of
the trail. He told it briefly, but with the vividness of one whose words
are coined straight from the crucible of bitter experience, and while she
listened, her heart shone in her passionate eyes. "What if it had
happened," she broke out at last. "If it had, Johnny, it would have been
my fault. I drove you into going up there. I'm responsible for this hand.
I--I couldn't have stood worse than that."

The little man beamed. "Is that so, Annabel? Then I'm mighty glad
Weatherbee followed that stampede. Nobody else would have seen my hand
sticking up through the snow and stopped to dig me out. Unless--" he added
thoughtfully, "it was Hollis Tisdale. Yes, likely Hollis would. He was the
only man in Alaska fit to be Dave's running mate."

"Do you mean that surveyor?" she asked.

Banks nodded.

"I thought so," she said with satisfaction. "Dad taught me to size people
up on sight. He could tell the first minute he saw a man's face whether he
was good for a bill of groceries or not; and I knew that surveyor was
straight. I bet he knew you was in Seattle when he got me to write. But I
wish I could have a look at the other one. He must be--great."

Banks nodded again. "He was," he answered huskily. "He was. But he's made
his last trip. I wasn't three hundred miles off, but I never thought of
Dave Weatherbee's needing help; it took Tisdale, clear off in Nome, over a
thousand miles, to sense something was wrong. But he started to mush it,
alone with his huskies, to the Iditarod and on to the Aurora, Dave's mine.
You don't know anything about that winter trail, Annabel. It means from
twenty to fifty below, with the wind swooping out of every canyon,
cross-cutting like knives, and not the sign of a road-house in days, in
weeks sometimes. But he made it,"--Banks' voice reached high pitch--"He
beat the records, my, yes."

"And something was wrong?" asked Annab