the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those
sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards,
at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few
days at long intervals, when the two miners had exchanged their labor for
some engineering, he had made his improvements alone, single-handed. And
most of that flume was constructed in those slow months he waited to hear
from me."

Tisdale paused, and again his glance sought the faces of those who had
known David Weatherbee. But all the Circle was strung responsive. Those
who never had known Weatherbee understood the terrible conditions he had
braved; the body-wracking toil underground; the soul-breaking solitude;
the crowding silence that months earlier he had felt the necessity to
escape. In that picked company, the latent force in each acknowledged the
iron courage of the man; but it was Tisdale's magnetic personality, the
unstudied play of expression in his rugged face, the undercurrent of
emotion quickening through infinite tones of his voice, that plumbed the
depths and in every listener struck the dominant chord. And, too, these
men had bridged subconsciously those vast distances between Tisdale's
start from Nome in clear weather, "with a moon in her second quarter," and
that stop at the deserted mine, when his dogs--powerful huskies, part
wolf, since they were bred in the Seward Peninsula--"were nearly done
for." Long and inevitable periods of dark there had been; perils of white
blizzard, of black frost. They had run familiarly the whole gamut of
hardship and danger he himself must have faced single-handed; and while
full measure was accorded Weatherbee, the greater tribute passed silently,
unsought, to the man who had traveled so far and so fast to rescue him.

"It ought to have been me," exclaimed Lucky Banks at last in his high
treble. "I was just down in the Iditarod country, less than three hundred