y and smiling just as she did that day I
left her at Seattle so long ago. Then, as the ship came alongside the
dock, and she walked down the gangway, and I took her hand to kiss her,
her face suddenly changed. She was not Beatriz; she was Lilias. My God, if
it had been Lilias! Why, she would be here now, she and little Bee,
filling this frozen cabin with summer."

The final date was two months later.

"Still snowing," it ran. "Snowing. God, how I want to break away from this
hole. Get out somewhere, where men are alive and doing things. Nothing is
moving here but the snow and those two black buttes out there. They keep
crowding closer through the smother, watching everything I do. I've warned
them to keep back. They must, or I'll blow them off the face of the earth.
Oh, I'll do it, if it takes all that's left of the dynamite. I won't have
them threatening Lilias when she comes. She is coming; she said she would,
unless I went out to the States. And I can't go; I haven't heard from
Tisdale. I never have told her about those buttes. It's unusual; she might
not believe it; she would worry and think, perhaps, I am growing like
Barbour. God! Suppose I am. Suppose she should come up here in this
wilderness to find me a wreck like him. She must not come. I've got to
prevent it. But I've offered my half interest in the Aurora to Tisdale. He
will take it. He never failed me yet."

Tisdale closed the book and laid it down. Furrows seamed his face,
changing, re-forming, to the inner upheaval. After awhile, he lifted
Weatherbee's watch from the desk and mechanically pressed the spring. The
lower case opened, but the picture he remembered was not there. In its
place was the face of the other child, his namesake, "Bee."

Out in the patio the pool rippled ceaselessly; the fountain threw its
silver ribbon of spray, and Beatriz waited, listening, with her eyes
turned to the room she had left. At last she heard his step. It was the
tread of a man whose decision was made. She sank down on the curb of the
basin near one of the palms. Behind her an open door, creaking in the
light wind, swung wide, and beyond it the upper flume stretched back to
the natural reservoir where she had been imprisoned by the fallen pine
tree. His glance, as he crossed the court, moved from her through this
door and back to her face.

"You were right," he said. "But it would have been different if David had
known about his child. His great heart was starved."