The Rim of the Desert | Page 6

letter I wrote to explain my delay, I sketched a plan of my summer's work and told him how sorry I was I had missed seeing him while the party was camped below Rainy Pass. Though I couldn't have spared the time to go to the Aurora, he might have found me, had I sent an Indian with word. It was the first time I had gone through his orbit without letting him know.
"But after that carrier had gone, Weatherbee's letter kept worrying me. It wasn't like him to complain, yet he had written he was tired of the eternal winters; he couldn't stand those everlasting snow peaks sometimes, they got to crowding him so; they kept him awake when he needed sleep, threatening him. 'I've got to break away from them, Hollis,' he said, 'and get where it's warm once more; and when my blood begins to thaw, I'll show you I can make a go of things.' Then he reminded me of the land he owned down here on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The soil was the finest volcanic ash; the kind that grew the vineyards on Vesuvius, and he meant to plant it with grapes; with orchards, too, on the bench levels. All the tract needed was water, but there was a natural reservoir and spring on a certain high plateau that could be easily tapped with a flume."
Tisdale paused while his glance moved slowly, singling out those who had known Weatherbee. A great gentleness rested on his face, and when he went on, it crept like a caress through his voice. "Most of you have heard him talk about that irrigation scheme; some of you have seen those plans he used to-work on, long Alaska nights. It was his dream for years. He went north in the beginning just to accumulate capital enough to swing that 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 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