“How has the business gone, father,” he asked after a while. “Did you manage without me in the office?” “Not over well,” replied his father soberly. “It has been a long hard pull on very little capital. Still, we are getting on.” Harry noted again the gray in his father’s hair and the lines of patient determination about the mouth that had not been there when he went away, and felt his heart thrill with joy at the thought that he had come back amply able to help him. He knew now that he had not cared for the money for its own sake. He had enjoyed the excitement of getting it. He had been glad that he and Joe could go to college together; they had planned that on the way home, and he felt now that he realized the value of a college education as he had never done before. But here was a better use for money than all that. He could lift the burden that his father had borne so patiently and put the family back where it had been before the business disaster. This was a greater happiness yet in his home-coming. “Would fifty thousand dollars help you, father?” he asked quietly. “It would indeed, my boy,” replied his father, smiling rather sadly, “but I don’t see where I am to get it.” “Well, I do,” said Harry triumphantly. “I’ve some things up my sleeve, as the boys say, that I haven’t said anything about yet. I wanted them for the last. In the first place, though, here’s a little present from the Arctic for you and mother. Wait till I open my grip.” His hands trembled as he pulled out the bandana handkerchief and opened it, just as they had when he did the same thing for Colonel Lane up at Candle Creek. “Why, my son,” said his father in astonishment, “what’s this?” “Gold, daddy, gold!” shouted Harry, dancing round the two in his excitement and delight. “Just a little souvenir that I mined up in the Arctic with my own hands. We got out twelve thousand, Joe and I. That’s only a little of it, but I thought it would make a nice thing for a present when I got home. There’s about a thousand there. I’ve got notes for the rest.” “Why, Harry!” ejaculated his mother, her eyes gleaming with delight in her son’s success. “Don’t tear around so. The neighbors will think the house is afire.” “And so it will be in a minute, mother. That isn’t half of it. Look at this, and this.” He threw down two long envelopes filled with documents. “There’s notes of Colonel Lane, the millionaire mining magnate of California, for about seventy thousand dollars, and there’s the papers that show I am a quarter owner in the richest placer mine in all Alaska.” His father’s eyes gleamed as he looked carefully at these papers, and Harry gave his mother a hug that he must surely have learned of the polar bears up at Point Lay.