project. But the more I studied that letter, the more confident I was he
had stayed his limit; he was breaking, and he knew it. That was why he was
so anxious to turn the Aurora over to me and get to the States. Finally I
decided to go with the mail carrier and on to the mine. If Weatherbee was
still there, as I believed, we would travel to Fairbanks together and take
the Valdez trail out to the open harbor on Prince William Sound. I picked
up a team of eight good huskies--the weather was clear with a moon in her
second quarter--and I started light, cutting my stops short; but when I
left Nome I had lost four days."

Hollis paused another interval, looking off again through the open door,
while the far-sighted expression gathered in his eyes. It was as though
his listeners also in that moment saw those white solitudes stretching
limitless under the Arctic night.

"I never caught up with that carrier," he went on, "and the messenger he
sent on broke trail for me all the way to the Aurora. I met him on his
return trip, thirty hours out from the mine. But he had found Weatherbee
there, and had a deed for me which David had asked him to see recorded and
forwarded to me at Nome. It was a relief to hear he had been able to
attend to these business matters, but I wondered why he had not brought
the deed himself, since he must come that way to strike the Fairbanks
trail, and why the man had not waited to travel with him. Then he told me
Weatherbee had decided to use the route I had sketched in my letter. The
messenger had tried to dissuade him; he had reminded him there were no
road-houses, and that the traces left by my party must have been wiped out
by the winter snows. But Weatherbee argued that the new route would
shorten the distance to open tide-water hundreds of miles; that his
nearest neighbors were in that direction, fifty miles to the south; and
they would let him have dogs. Then, when he struck the Susitna Valley, he