There was a stir along the table; a sighing breath. Then some one laughed, and Banks piped his strained note. "And," he said after a moment, "of course you kept on to that missionary camp and waited for the fog to lift."
Tisdale shook his head. "After that supper, there wasn't any need; I turned back to the glacier. And before I reached the landing, I heard Weatherbee's voice booming out on the thick silence like a siren at sea; piloting me straight to that one dip in the ice-wall."
He looked off again to the end of the room, absently, with the far-sighted gaze of one accustomed to travel great solitudes. It was as though he heard again that singing voice. Then suddenly his expression changed. His eyes had rested on a Kodiak bearskin that hung against a pillar at the top of the gallery steps. The corner was unlighted, in heavy shadow, but a hand reaching from behind had drawn the rug slightly aside, and its whiteness on the brown fur, the flash of a jewelled ring, caught his attention. The next moment the hand was withdrawn. He gave it no more thought then, but a time came afterward when he remembered it.
"Weatherbee had noticed that fog-bank," he went on, "from high up the glacier. It worried him so he finally turned back to meet me, and he had waited so long he was down to his last biscuit. I was mighty reckless about that second ptarmigan, but the water the birds were cooked in made a fine soup. And the fog broke, and we overtook the Tlinket and supplies the next morning."
There was another stir along the table, then Foster said: "That was a great voice of Weatherbee's. I've seen it hearten a whole crowd on a mean trail, like the bugle and fife of a regiment."
"So have I." It was Lucky Banks who spoke. "So have I. And Weatherbee was always ready to stand by a poor devil in a tight place. When the frost got me"--he held up a crippled and withered hand--"it was Dave Weatherbee who pulled me through. We were mushing it on the same stampede from Fairbanks to Ruby Creek, and he never had seen me before. It had come to the last day, and we were fighting it out in the teeth of a blizzard. You all know what that means. In the end we just kept the trail, following the hummocks. Sometimes it was a pack under a drift, or maybe a sled; and sometimes it was a hand reaching up through the snow, frozen stiff. Then it came my turn, and I lay down in my tracks. But Weatherbee stopped to work over me. He wouldn't go on. He said if I was determined to stay in that cemet'ry, I could count on his company. And when he got me on my feet, he just started 'Dixie,' nice and lively, and the next I knew he had me all wound up and set going again, good as new."