"It was one of those rich pockets we find sometimes along a glacier that make fortunes for the first men, while the rank and file pan out defeat and disappointment. There was the quartz body above, stringers and veins of it reaching through the graywackes and slate, but to handle it Weatherbee must set up a stamp-mill; and only a line of pack-mules from the Andes, and another line of steamships could transport the ore to the nearest smelter, on Puget Sound. So--he took up the long trek northward again, to the Tanana. Think of it! The irony of it!"
Tisdale rose and turned on the step to look down at her. The light from the lantern intensified the furrows between his brooding eyes. "And think what it meant to Weatherbee to have seen, as he had, day after day, hour after hour, the heart of another man's wife laid bare, while to his own he himself was simply a source of revenue."
Miss Armitage too rose and stood meeting his look. Her lip trembled a little, but the blue lights flamed in her eyes. "You believe that," she said, and her voice dropped into an unexpected note. "You believe he threw away that rich discovery for the few hundreds of dollars he sent his wife; but I know--she was told--differently. She thought he was glad to--escape-- at so small a price. He wrote he was glad she had reconsidered that trip; Alaska was no place for her."
"Madam," Tisdale remonstrated softly, "you couldn't judge David Weatherbee literally by his letters. If you had ever felt his personality, you would have caught the undercurrent, deep and strong, sweeping between the lines. It wasn't himself that counted; it was what was best for her. You couldn't estimate him by other men; he stood, like your white mountain, alone above the crowd. And he set a pedestal higher than himself and raised his wife there to worship and glorify. A word from her at any time would have turned the balance and brought him home; her presence, her sympathy, even that last season at the Aurora mine, would have brought him through. I wish you had seen his face that day I met him below the glacier and had told him about the woman waiting down the gorge. 'My God, Tisdale,' he said, 'suppose it had been my wife.'"
Miss Armitage stood another moment, locking her hands one over the other in a tightening grip. Her lip trembled again, but the words failed. She turned and walked uncertainly the few steps to the end of the porch.
