would have miles of railroad bed to ease the last stage. So, at the time
the messenger left the Aurora, Weatherbee started south on his long trek
to Rainy Pass. He was mushing afoot, with Tyee pulling the sled. Some of
you must remember that big husky with a strain of St. Bernard he used to
drive on the Tanana."

"My, yes," piped little Banks, and his eyes scintillated like chippings of
blue glacier ice. "Likely I do remember Tyee. Dave picked him up that same
trip he set me on my feet. He found him left to starve on the trail with a
broken leg. And he camped right there, pitched his tent for a hospital,
and went to whittling splints out of a piece of willow to set that bone.
'I am sorry to keep you waiting,' he says to me, 'but he is a mighty good
dog. He would have done his level best to see the man who deserted him
through.' And he would. I'd bank my money on old Tyee."

Tisdale nodded slowly. "But my chance to overtake David was before he
secured that team fifty miles on. And I pushed my dogs too hard. When I
reached the Aurora, they were nearly done for. I was forced to rest them a
day. That gave me time to look into Weatherbee's work. I found that the
creek where he had made his discovery ran through a deep and narrow
canyon, and it was clear to me that the boxed channel, which was frozen
solid then, was fed during the short summer by a small glacier at the top
of the gorge. To turn the high water from his placer, he had made a bore
of nearly one thousand feet and practically through rock. I followed a
bucket tramway he had rigged to lift the dump and found a primitive
lighting-plant underground. The whole tunnel was completed, with the
exception of a thin wall left to safeguard against an early thaw in the
stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all
know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled
road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up