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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Scarlett of the Mounted, by Marguerite
+Merington
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Scarlett of the Mounted
+
+
+Author: Marguerite Merington
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2011  [eBook #37949]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCARLETT OF THE MOUNTED***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Roland Schlenker, Matthew Wheaton, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 37949-h.htm or 37949-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37949/37949-h/37949-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37949/37949-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+SCARLETT OF THE MOUNTED
+
+
+[Illustration: SHE STUCK A PIN IN THE HANDKERCHIEF.]
+
+
+SCARLETT OF THE MOUNTED
+
+by
+
+MARGUERITE MERINGTON
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Moffat, Yard & Company
+1906
+
+Copyright, 1906, by
+Moffat, Yard & Company
+New York
+
+Published, August, 1906
+
+J. F. Tapley Co.
+Printers and Binders
+New York
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER
+
+       I LOST SHOE CREEK
+      II THE WOMENKIND OF LOST SHOE CREEK
+     III LUCKY DURAND
+      IV THE PICTURE GIRL
+       V EVELYN ENGAGES A COURIER
+      VI EVELYN SEEKS COUNSEL
+     VII PEACE, PERFECT PEACE
+    VIII AT THE SIGN OF THE TEMPERANCE SALOON
+      IX THE PROVISIONAL BOUNDARY
+       X LUCKY'S LUCK
+      XI AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
+     XII NORTHERN LIGHTS
+    XIII A YEAR AFTER
+     XIV CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+    SHE STUCK A PIN IN THE HANDKERCHIEF _Frontispiece_
+
+    MINGLED WITH THE TRAVELERS AT GUMBOOT ANNIE'S BOARD
+
+    DEPARTED IN A GLOW OF SELF CONGRATULATION AT HER TACT
+
+    "WHY, MY DAUGHTER, DOES THIS DENOTE A HAPPY CHANGE OF HEART AND
+      SAVING GRACE? YOU ARE TAKING THOUGHT TO SAVE YOUR SOUL?"
+
+    "DARTER DON'T LOOK AS IF IT WAS SPELLED RIGHT," CRITICIZED BULLY
+
+    THE UBIQUITOUS YOUNG SOLDIER, SERGEANT SCARLETT
+
+
+
+
+SCARLETT _of the_ MOUNTED
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+LOST SHOE CREEK
+
+
+Parson MacLane came running along the rough trail, his dogs, Telegraph
+and Wrangel, named after former mission charges, following. As he paused
+at the crest of a hill to take breath and wipe the grime from his face
+he smiled, for over the thicket of scrub willow that lay between him and
+Lost Shoe Creek rose the voices of the "boys" he had traveled far to
+reach. Then he sighed, because the jest and song, as he heard them, were
+ribald; the laughter thick with drink. Finally, reflecting that in no
+human heart had he ever found evil so strong but that the good was
+stronger, he smiled again, and stooping to pluck from a low-growing bush
+the deep crimson wild rose of the north, he set this in his buttonhole,
+and squaring his shoulders for a fresh bout with his old adversary of
+horns and cloven hoof, trotted cheerily down the steep incline.
+
+With an expiring wheeze the concertina dropped from the singer's hand.
+One of the group playing Black Jack, looked up. "Go on, Bill! Thar's
+other verses--an' each more decorative than the last!"
+
+Lighting a pipe, Bill shook his head. "Grand opera sore throat! Left my
+music at home--and home," he added, under his ragged mustache, "is so
+cursed far away!"
+
+Mops' remonstrance was cut short by a disparaging comment on his methods
+of card-playing from a raw-boned Scotchman who had lost an
+inconsiderable amount. "You accuse me o' cheatin'?"
+
+"Aweel!" Sandy scratched his head. "While it's na' to say cheating it's
+na' to say fair playing neither!"
+
+"You liar!" kicking over the barrel that served for a table, with a
+volley of oaths Mops sprang at him, and a free fight would have ensued
+but for the intervention of the more cautious, who, pointing to a
+squalid bundle from which lusty snores were issuing, reminded the
+belligerents that if Bully Nick were roused from his innocent slumbers
+some indiscriminate gun-play might be looked for, transmuting every
+mother's son into cold meat. This argument prevailed; peace was restored
+and celebrated in the dire wassail of the district, served in the open
+by Ikey, bartender of the dilapidated refreshment-tent nearby, and by
+general consent charged to the protesting but helpless Sandy.
+
+It was at this auspicious moment that, followed by his dogs, rose in
+buttonhole, and with smiling countenance, Parson Maclane made his
+entrance into the camp on Lost Shoe Creek.
+
+Hailing the newcomer as dude and tenderfoot, with winks and nudges among
+themselves the men prepared to "have fun" with him. Raising their
+glasses in derisive welcome, "Hello, stranger!" they chorused. "'Drink
+your health!"
+
+"Thanks, friends, but I fear you are not drinking your own!"
+
+"By gum," cried Mops, delightedly, "if he ain't a blamed teetotaller!"
+
+"The Laird kens we hae need o' sic," hiccoughed Sandy. "Hoots, but we're
+a sinfu' crew! Ikey, lad, mair whuskey!"
+
+While glasses were being refilled, this time at Mops' expense, Maclane
+went toward the tent, over whose entrance hung the sign KLONDIKE
+DELMONICO'S. GUMBOOT ANNIE. Addressing the plump female in jersey and
+culottes, who lolled beneath, picking her teeth skilfully: "Good day,
+madam," he began, baring his head. "I should like to speak with the
+proprietor."
+
+Gumboot Annie took time to spit before replying, "I am the lady."
+
+"I want to hold a prayer-meeting. Will you lend me your tent?"
+
+"Lend! Me lend anything! Now wouldn't that pa'alyze yer!" she demanded
+of the listening prospectors. "I ain't up here fer me health," she then
+explained to Maclane, "but I'll sell or rent anything in sight. Twenty
+dollars is the price for a Gospel show!"
+
+"Agreed!"
+
+"Thar's a bar in thar, y'know!"
+
+"Oh, the bar's no hindrance!" The minister already was unstrapping his
+pack of hymnals. "But I warn you I shall preach against the evils of
+drink."
+
+"That's all right. The boys ull be jest as thirsty! Say, fer five
+dollars you kin convert Ikey. He's useter it. He gives his experiences
+real cute. Water is two bits a bucket, but fer a baptism attraction I'll
+throw it in!"
+
+Refusing with a gesture, the minister seized the dinner-bell from its
+nail and rang it vigorously. "Prayer-meeting and service of song. All
+are cordially welcome!"
+
+"Wouldn't it be slick ter dump him in the creek," suggested one.
+
+"No, no! Lay low till Bully Nick wakes up! Nick ull fix him," said
+Mops, to which the rest agreed, "Betcherlife!"
+
+"Come, boys," urged Maclane, "who'll lead the way?"
+
+After a chilly silence, "Don't all speak at once," jeered Mops. "Don't
+crowd the mourners," echoed Bill.
+
+"You have mothers, sweethearts, wives, who never cease to pray for you.
+Won't you spare a few minutes from Black Jack to put up a prayer for
+them?"
+
+A pause followed, during which Bill swallowed a lump in his throat and
+tried not to think of the mother in Montreal, whose last letter he had
+been carrying about for eleven months, unanswered. Mops sent Ikey for
+more drinks.
+
+"'Twull be a saving i' the lang run!" Foreseeing that he might again be
+called upon to pay, Sandy stumbled toward the tent, falling over rows of
+jocosely outstretched feet. "I misdoot my gait is na sae steady as it
+micht be! A touch o' scurvy!"
+
+"Oh, we're all liable to trip!" Maclane helped him up. "Who'll be next?"
+
+"Count me in, Dominie!" An elderly man, gaunt and ill-clad, gold-pan
+under his arm, climbed the banks of the creek and entered the tent.
+
+"Old Lucky's down on his luck, but he gen'lly knows whar the gold is!" A
+boyish-looking prospector, who had been wanting an excuse, joined him.
+
+Several followed the example, till at last only Nick and his bodyguard
+remained outside. When a rousing chorus of "Onward, Christian Soldiers,"
+pealed forth from the tent, Mops chuckled joyously. "Look out fer
+fireworks! Nick's waking!"
+
+After preliminary grunts and stretchings the Bully sat up in his ugliest
+mood. "Wot th' hell---- Is this Jedgment Day?"
+
+"Naw! Only some blasted holy windmill come for to save our souls," Bill
+informed him.
+
+"The cursed stiff!" Nick sprang toward the tent. "I'll teach him ter
+meddle with my anatomy!" He cocked his pistol. "One, two----"
+
+"Bully Nick! He never misses the bull's-eye!" shouted his delighted
+followers.
+
+At this juncture a fresh-skinned young giant in blouse and overalls, who
+had been chopping kindlings by Gumboot Annie's woodpile, dropped his
+hatchet and strolled up with a casual air wholly at variance with the
+keen, hawk-like glance of his gray-blue eyes. As Nick told off the last
+minutes of Parson Maclane's earthly span, the newcomer pinioned him in
+a grasp of iron from behind. "Not this time, Bully Nick!"
+
+"Eh? Who the mischief are ye to stop me?" is the polite, free rendering
+of Nick's impolite free speech. "I don't think I hev the pleasure of
+your acquaintance, my lad!"
+
+"I've been wanting for some time to make yours!" The young man seemed
+quite unconcerned that the toughest gang in the district had forcibly
+detached him from their chief and were holding him prisoner.
+
+"It's just a looney Irishman that's been hanging 'round all day! Ain't
+worth a bullet, Nick!" At heart, Bill disliked human targets for sport.
+
+"Powerful strong! His muscles ud be wuth more ter ye than his darned
+hide, Nick," supplemented Mops, who, while without prejudices as to
+bloodshed, sometimes was called on to exert himself unduly.
+
+"I'll assay him," decreed the Bully. "Fust he shall drink my health!
+Mops, you hold the booze ter the stiff's mouth! Bill, you got a ticker;
+you keep time. Now, sonny, I give yer jest two minutes fer mamma's
+little baby boy ter say his prayers in, or ter git good an' drunk, like
+me. See?"
+
+The young man yawned, with a bored expression. "Excuse my not putting my
+hand before my mouth, gentlemen!"
+
+"One minute gone, pard!" admonished Bill.
+
+"Phew!" The prisoner spat out the liquid Mops forced between his lips.
+"That filthy stuff! I only drink the best! Besides, 'tis smuggled, and,
+living or dead, I should incur a fine with contraband goods on, or in,
+my person!"
+
+"You all-fired nateral, do yer _want_ ter be a angel?" growled the
+Bully.
+
+"Faith, I wasn't aspiring to such promotion," admitted the stranger.
+"But I'd look prettier that way than making myself a drunken beast like
+you, Nick!"
+
+The insult had its effect; the Bully's pistol hand quavered, and he was
+lost. "Say, young feller, you got grit! You're game! Boys, the Irishman
+goes, see!"
+
+"Sorry I can't return the favor, Nick! You go--but to gaol!" With an
+adroit movement the young man had whisked out a pair of handcuffs and
+was fitting them to the astonished Bully's wrists. "Best take it
+quietly, men. As they say in story-books, reinforcements are at hand!
+And till they come, get in there, all of you, and say your own prayers!"
+He lifted the tent flap. "Fall into line. Um, left. Left!--Left! March!"
+
+"Who in blazes air ye?" gasped Nick, as he obeyed.
+
+The answer came in awe-stricken tones from Mops, who, beneath the
+stranger's rough externals had suddenly suspected the insignia of a
+dreaded authority. "The hell! It's Scarlett of the Mounted!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WOMENKIND OF LOST SHOE CREEK
+
+
+Dandy Raish swaggered up to the tent where he had an appointment with
+old Blenksoe, relating to a little matter of holding up the stage, but
+finding services in progress, he scattered a few flowers of profanity,
+and turned on his heel.
+
+Scarlett, pacing to and fro while awaiting aid, caught sight of him.
+"Now, that's a gentleman whose company I'd fancy most in his absence,
+I'm thinking!" To escape the other's observation while making his own,
+he returned to his kindlings.
+
+Developments came soon, first in the person of a woman wrapped in a red
+cloak, young and comely, but at the moment repulsive from the effects of
+a debauch. Reeling from the shelter of a ruined cabin, "Gumboot Annie!"
+she cried, "Gumboot Annie, for the love of heaven, trust me with the
+price of a drink!"
+
+Finding the source of refreshments temporarily inaccessible, she threw
+herself on a bench, cursing religion, even as Raish had done.
+
+"Furs for sale; snow-shoes, moccasins, furs, velly damn fine!" An Indian
+trader coming by recognized the girl, and accosted her. "Hello, Gelly!
+Shake!"
+
+The girl complied good-naturedly. "Hello, Chilkat Jo!"
+
+"Gelly, I love you!" stated Jo, in unimpassioned monotone. "Love you
+like hell-you-betyerlife! Say, Gelly, you mally me?"
+
+"Say, Jo, that's a proposal, even if you ain't nothin' but a Siwash!"
+
+"Me no Siwash!" Chilkat Jo drew himself up. "Me chew, swear, gamble,
+dlink like hell, plenty wives, all same as Clistian white man!"
+
+"My, but you do give us a character," laughed the girl, "and I guess
+we've earned it all right, all right! But, no, Jo! I ain't sunk so low
+I'd marry you without I cared fer yer! Thar's only one man in the world
+fer me!" With a sigh she looked over at Dandy Raish, who, leaning
+against a Douglas spruce, was dressing his waxed mustache by the aid of
+a pocket looking-glass.
+
+The Indian took his rejection with outward stoicism. "That's all light.
+Some day I kill him, cally you off, beat you, smash yer face, make you
+goddam' bad husband, all same as Clistian white man!" Then off he
+stalked, crying: "Furs for sale. Moccasins. Hair dye! Sacled images!
+Velly dam good sacled images!"
+
+Gelly rose and timidly approached the object of her affections. "Raish!
+Dear Dandy, won't you speak to me?"
+
+"Gelly!" The man turned on her with an oath. "Taggin' on as usual!"
+
+"Raish, pop's turned me out, along of you, and I don't know whar ter
+go!"
+
+"Such as you needn't look far! There, there, Gelly, don't get mad! I'm
+sorry for you; indeed I am!"
+
+"Then marry me!"
+
+"Me marry you! With my social gifts! Ha, ha! You're crazy! But I'll tell
+you what I will do: I'll help you out of this place; I'll get you a
+berth in a swell saloon at Skagway, with a big rake-off on every bottle
+that's uncorked and every bird that's plucked through you!"
+
+"And me tryin' to be decent! Curse it all, I _will_ be decent! You
+_shall_ marry me!"
+
+"I'll strangle you first!"
+
+"Take your hands off that woman!"
+
+Turning, Raish confronted a young giant, and being a coward he obeyed.
+"I can't spoil her!" he sneered.
+
+"What is the trouble?" Scarlett asked of Gelly.
+
+"None of your business," she replied, with feminine ingratitude.
+
+"Is this your husband?"
+
+"Sure!" At Raish's threatening gesture she modified the assertion. "In a
+sort of way!"
+
+"The only sort of way he ever will be, you bet your boots," Raish flung
+back as, hands in pockets, he swaggered off.
+
+"What is your name?" Scarlett asked the girl.
+
+"Gelly!"
+
+"Your full name? Gelly what?"
+
+"Ah, now you're gettin' too familiar!" Sidling closer she remarked,
+approvingly: "Say, you're an awful pretty boy!"
+
+"Stand off!" As the girl shrank back, cowering, he added more gently:
+"Go home to your parents!"
+
+"My home! My parents! Aw, that's a good un! Ma sloped with a faro dealer
+from 'Frisco, and pop's turned me out!"
+
+"Poor child! You must get away from this district! I will send you down
+to a mission, where good women will care for you!"
+
+"A mission? No, sirree! Too slow fer me!" Gelly moved away, humming a
+ditty popular in low-class music-halls of the locality.
+
+"Stop!" Scarlett sharply reprimanded. "Sing if you will! Sing all you
+can! The world has need of singing--but sing decent songs!" As a
+stirring hymn, accompanied by Bill's concertina, just then sounded from
+the tent, he went on: "Go in and help them! They need a woman's voice."
+
+"What!" Gelly was genuinely astonished. "Such as me--in church!"
+
+"My poor girl, churches are for such as you."
+
+Gelly looked in, uncertainly, then hurriedly drew back. "I can't,
+mister. Pop's in thar--and pop has sworn ter kill me on sight! Pop's the
+bully of the district," she added, proudly.
+
+"Hm!" Scarlett considered a moment, then felt in his pocket. "Here's
+needle and thread. Go mend your clothes!"
+
+Gelly stared at him as she took the proffered housewife. "Say, you're a
+real white man. I never before----" Breaking into sudden sobbing, she
+went back to her cabin.
+
+Sergeant Scarlett gave a comprehensive glance at the scenery, nature's
+magnificent setting for this squalid drama.
+
+"This district has the name of being the hottest proposition this side
+of Hades," he reflected. "It contains an unsurveyed number of square
+miles and crooked inhabitants. And it needs just three things to clean
+it out. First, godliness, which only gets this way for a flying visit
+once a year. Next--and it's only modesty prevented my putting it
+first--law, which is just myself; and last, but foremost, women! And all
+the womenkind we can muster are a travesty of the name--sketches the
+Lord seems to have blotted in the making and thrown away." With tender
+impatience he touched a cluster of wild roses with the toe of his
+military boot. "Oh, why can't ye stop running to flowers and blossom
+girls instead! Hello! Is this an answer to prayer, or a deceiving
+dream?" Sure enough, among the crimson petals a girl's face laughed,
+sparkling back at him. "By the St. Colmcille, a young lady at me feet!
+Permit me to reverse the positions, miss!" Picking up the miniature, he
+scanned the features closely. "Young? Yes, the right age, just; still in
+her teens, but not too teeny! Pretty? Verdict unanimous, without leaving
+the jury-box; guilty of wholesale manslaughter wherever those eyes set
+foot! Good? As good as virgin gold! Perhaps a trifle too well pleased
+with herself. Here, young lady, give an account of yourself! What are
+you doing in my district? Are you visiting father, brother, sweetheart,
+or do you intend to stake a claim on some poor wretch's unprospected
+heart? Oh, here's a bit of writing on the back. 'For dear daddy, from
+Evelyn,' Evelyn. A pretty name. Sounds like Eve with a little flounce
+on. Daddy. I'm glad it's a mere father ye belong to. Now since ye've
+dropped like manna from heaven to the wilderness, will ye think it a
+liberty if I----" He approached the picture to his lips, then put it
+resolutely aside. "No! I'm not the coward to kiss a girl anyway but to
+her face!" In his absorption he had failed to observe a uniformed rider
+coming at full gallop along the trail, and he had barely time to conceal
+the miniature in his breast as Barney, his assistant and devoted
+personal follower, dismounted a few paces from him.
+
+Instead of greeting his chief with the proper military salute, Barney
+pushed him arrogantly aside.
+
+"Out av the shadow av your supariors, ye hulking son av a tiligraph
+pole!"
+
+"Back into your own skin, you jackass, you!" Scarlett returned the push
+with interest.
+
+Recognizing the other through his disguise, "Bejabers," exclaimed
+Barney, "'tis Himself!"
+
+"You're late in coming up to time," remarked Scarlett, absently, his
+thoughts still on the portrait.
+
+"Sure, sorr, an' 'twas the word from yourself I've been delaying for!
+Ivery moment av the last four-an'-twenty hours I've slept at attintion
+with me boots on and nary a wink on me! As me own flesh is livin'
+witness, I've never moved me hindquarters from the saddle!"
+
+"I wish you'd learn to keep your headquarters in the saddle," returned
+Scarlett. "Didn't I instruct ye if ye hadn't heard from me by the day
+appointed to start the day before?"
+
+Barney scratched a puzzled head. He could interpret his own Irish bulls
+readily enough, defending them, if needful, with his fists to a jury of
+his peers, but those of his chief often passed him. Tactfully, he
+changed the conversation. "The mail arrived, Sergeant, and was
+distributed impartially. Only this remains unclaimed; a registhry
+package, with duty to pay on it."
+
+Sergeant Scarlett examined the address on the parcel. "From E. Durant,
+New York City, to Matthew Durant, owner of the Rainbow Mine---- Where
+under the shining heavens is the Rainbow Mine, Barney?" he broke off to
+ask.
+
+"In the clouds, for aught I know, sorr. I searched the books, but in all
+the disthrict there's not even a claim recorded by the name, far less a
+mine."
+
+"H'm! Well, the man, if not his mine, may be sojourning in our bally.
+Step inside the tent, Barney, and when the parson pauses for breath,
+whisper to him to inquire for one Matthew Durant!"
+
+When Barney had gone on his errand, Scarlett performed the official act
+of unfastening the dainty package to appraise its contents. "White
+neckties, doubtless," he soliloquized. "That is what folk on the outside
+are by way of sending their kin to pull them through a Klondike winter.
+No, but almost as bad: an embroidered cigar-case, with jeweled clasp.
+Now I'm wondering if the fellow it's intended for can always muster up a
+pipeful of tobacco! Well, Barney, what success?"
+
+"Just at this present, sorr, the howly man has got his teeth well into
+the Evil Wan, but he tipped me the wink he'd find our man the moment he
+darst let go. Oh, by the way--I hate to decompose ye, Sergeant--but
+here's a letther for yourself!"
+
+"A letter for me, is it? Now, who the mischief would be writing to me?"
+
+"The mischief it is, indade, sorr! 'Tis a lawyer!"
+
+"A lawyer!" Scarlett scrutinized the name of the Dublin firm on the
+missive Barney handed him. "Now I'd give something to know what that
+means! I've always lived within the law, and without a lawyer!"
+
+"Sure, that's your offence, Sergeant. Depind on ut, that's phwat they're
+afther charging ye for!"
+
+"'Tis their inflated cheek, then!" Resentfully, Scarlett tore open the
+envelope. "If 'tis a bill they're sending me they can go to the divvle!"
+
+"Faith, sorr, that's exactly where they'll have ye! That's phwat they're
+afther counting on!"
+
+Barney watched his chief with affectionate solicitude while the latter
+read, and, crossing himself, began a prayer in which pious invocations
+mingled strangely with unflattering estimates of legal lights. "Howly
+Mary, full av grace---- The dirthy blackguards, I wish I'd lost the
+letther for the lad! Blessed art thou among---- Bad cess to yez, ye
+black limbs av an onreputable body, if 'tis only nearer ye were, or
+meself less far away, rest aisy 'tis outwitted ye'd be intoirely, if
+there's anny diplomacy in the fists av this Mick at all. Name av the
+Father, Son an' Howly----"
+
+"Phew!" At last Scarlett broke through the stupor with which the perusal
+of his letter seemed to have encompassed him. "Is it I standing here in
+my five senses, or the fool of a deceiving dream? Barney, man, listen to
+this and pronounce on it. 'By the demise of your uncle'--that's my
+uncle, you understand?"
+
+"Sure, sorr, your uncle is my uncle; and many's the accommodation we've
+had off him, thanks be!"
+
+"Oh, this doesn't refer to that impartial relative of all impoverished
+humanity! This is, or was, the man who prevented my father from being
+the eldest son and only child of his parents! By his demise----"
+
+"Precisely, sorr. And which av his qualifications may his demise be?"
+
+"The final one. Demise means death. Oh, not the commonplace, every-day
+occurrence as we up here experience it; it is applied to those who have
+something of value besides life to leave behind."
+
+"Faith, then, sergeant, it's ourselves will be immune."
+
+"That's what I'm doubting. Five minutes since, I was nobody of nowhere.
+Now I suddenly find myself gazetted Sir Gerald Scarlett of Dunshinannon,
+owner of a picturesque, if ruined, castle; three acres that might be
+profitable under cultivation, and a cow!"
+
+Barney shook his head. "A grand dream, Sergeant. May the blissed saints
+soften the awakening to ye," he added, with commiseration.
+
+"But, man--here, look at this, will ye?" Before his astonished eyes
+Scarlett held a draft for a substantial sum. "A luck-slice from the
+rent-roll. Oh, that proves it no dream, since money talks, but never in
+its sleep!"
+
+Barney removed his regimental hat. "Hurrah for Sir Gerald, the castle,
+including the ruins, the acres, and ivery blissed pertaty, past, present
+and to come, adorning them!"
+
+"And the cow, God bless her!" Scarlett also bared his head.
+
+"Amen!" Barney supplemented, fervently. "I'm wid ye, sorr, in
+prosperity, as in adversity! How soon do we quit the service, me
+lordship?"
+
+"Not till we've finished out our term, you lazy vagabond! Meanwhile,
+sink the title. I travel on my soldiership, and you're in the same
+boat!"
+
+"Amen! if it has to be," acquiesced Barney, with philosophic
+resignation, saluting meekly. "And phwat's the next orders, me
+lord--Sergeant, I should say?"
+
+"For the present you can take charge and administer the law, unless
+anything demanding a judicial mind comes up, while I wander on incog.,
+and do a little prospecting to identify the toughs and crooks that give
+this the name of the blackest district in all the great Northwest! I've
+begun rather well; I've just rounded up Bully Nick and his
+sharp-shooting gang!"
+
+"Ye have?" Barney's jaw dropped with amazement. "Single-handed?"
+
+"Aye; but forewarned is four-armed, you know!"
+
+"Even so. Mother of Grace----"
+
+"Tut, tut, man; that's but a flea bite in the ocean, as one of our Irish
+philosophers remarked. There's a regularly organized band of
+thieves--aye, who don't stick at murder, either--that hold up stages,
+terrorize the whole community, and play the dickens generally. The scum
+of all nationalities, their headquarters are across the boundary in
+Uncle Sam's domain, while their field of operations is the whole
+Northwest. The thing is to identify them, catch them redhanded in our
+precincts."
+
+"A Herculaneum task, me lordship--Sergeant, I should say--and more,
+since that gintleman had only twelve impossibilities to conquer!"
+
+"Och, Hercules! I'd sooner any day be a whole man than just half a god
+like Hercules! Any able-bodied son of Erin should be able to match
+Hercules, except in the snake-strangling trick, since divvle an example
+did Saint Patrick leave us to practice on."
+
+"Thrue," assented Barney. "Many's the dhrink I've laid on it that the
+only snakes an Irishman is capable of behoulding is all in his own eye."
+
+"Don't ye be looking for them that way on duty. Keep your vision for
+two-legged crawlers. There was a fellow here, just now, who, if faces
+are incriminating testimony, stands twenty times convicted in the dark,
+or I'm a duffer in face-palmistry."
+
+"Why not begin with the rope's end, Sergeant?"
+
+"No, no, man! We must even make haste slowly, as some old Roman of an
+Irishman remarked. I'll just wander on, as if looking for a job, and if
+any one inquires about me, give me what character ye please!"
+
+"Faith, sorr, since fair play demands reciprocity on both sides, I'll
+damn ye for a blockhead!"
+
+"Go ahead," laughed Scarlett. Breaking off, he inquired: "Now who's this
+chee-charka coming up the trail?"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+LUCKY DURANT
+
+
+The lagging pace of the young man who was approaching, his weary stoop
+under a light pack he carried, miner-wise, upon his shoulders, confessed
+him all too surely the tenderfoot Scarlett had described him.
+
+With a bewildered stare at the congeries of squalid tents and cabins
+that comprised the camp, he accosted Barney.
+
+"Surely this can't be Lost Shoe Creek?" "Maybe it can't be, but that's
+phwat it does be, me lad!"
+
+"It's so different from what I expected."
+
+"Ye were anticipating skyscrapers? In these parts we build downwards for
+gold--and both ways lead equally far from heaven, I'm thinking."
+
+"Well, though not skyscrapers, I certainly had looked for something more
+imposing. Can you direct me to the office, or residence, of Mr. Matthew
+Durant?"
+
+"Durant!" Involuntarily, Barney and Scarlett exchanged a glance of
+surprise.
+
+"Office or residence, indade! 'Tis myself would like to be directed to
+the man," replied the former.
+
+"Oh, but surely you know him!" cried the newcomer. "I mean Matthew
+Durant, owner of the wonderful Rainbow Mine!"
+
+At this juncture the elderly man who had been spoken of by one of his
+brother prospectors as Lucky, came hurrying toward them from the tent,
+and addressed himself to Barney. "The Dominie has just announced that
+you have mail for one Matthew Durant, officer. I am he."
+
+Before Barney could reply the young tenderfoot had darted forward with a
+threatening gesture. "You Durant, indeed, you miserable fraud! I know
+Mr. Durant well," he turned to Barney to explain. "I was employed in the
+New York bank where he keeps his daughter's account, and many is the
+chat I've had with him. Why, I've resigned my position and spent every
+penny I'd saved to come out here to beg him to put me in the way of
+making my fortune, as he has done, scooping gold out of the earth. The
+idea of this beggarly imposter pretending to be Durant, owner of the
+Rainbow Mine!"
+
+A sad smile crossed the worn features of the claimant. "I must indeed be
+changed if Walter Pierce does not know me."
+
+At the sound of his voice the young man started, but gazed at the
+unshorn face, the poverty-stricken figure, unconvinced.
+
+"Ye have some means of identification, perhaps?" suggested Barney, in
+all good faith. "A strawberry mark, or a lock of your sainted mother's
+hair?"
+
+Durant thought a moment. "No one here knows me by the name. But, wait! I
+have a picture of my daughter Evelyn, whom Walter will recognize. Evelyn
+will bear witness that I'm her own dear daddy." He felt in his breast,
+but not finding what he sought, gave a smothered cry. "Lost--my little
+Evie, have I lost you?"
+
+"This is herself, I'm thinking!" Scarlett held out the miniature. "I
+found her on this spot, putting the wild roses to the blush."
+
+"Thank you--thank you! Evie!" Durant covered the portrait with kisses.
+
+"Which was to be proved," remarked Barney, conclusively, handing Durant
+his mail. "There's a thrifle av duty to pay on it, sorr."
+
+Durant's expectant hand dropped to his side. "I--I'm rather down on my
+luck just now," he faltered.
+
+While Barney hesitated between conscience and good will, Scarlett
+whispered in his ear. "Good!" he then exclaimed. "The Sergeant will
+settle it, Misther Durant. I mean," he corrected himself as Scarlett
+kicked his leg, "it is already settled. Me man here," he indicated his
+superior, "a great blockhead ordinarily, but with lucid intervals,
+reminds me that the duty was prepaid beforehand in advance."
+
+When the soldiers had moved away, Walter Pierce found his voice. "Then
+you are Durant. But where, where, where is the wonderful Rainbow Mine?"
+
+"Where it always has been--in the clouds!"
+
+"Good heavens, do you mean to say it is all a fraud?"
+
+"Less that than a fiction," amended the older man. "Sit here and I'll
+tell you all about it." He sank wearily on the ground, leaning against a
+huge pine tree, and when Walter had placed himself beside him, began his
+strange tale. "Oh, the money has been no fraud, as your bank can
+testify. I'm an old miner--a born prospector, with a nose for gold--and
+I've always had streaks of luck; I've always made my pile, in
+California, Colorado, and up here in Canada. But it has only been a rich
+pocket here and there. I've never managed to develop a proposition into
+a paying claim, or a paying claim into an exhaustless mine. But whenever
+I've had a big clean-up I've blown it all in, as your born miner
+invariably does, trusting to luck for the morrow. Some miners blow it in
+on cards, drink--on worthless properties--but I've had only one
+extravagance--my daughter. My wife always had vast ambitions, and when
+the wife died she passed them on to me for our only child. To educate
+Evelyn, to have her brought up a flower of civilization, that always has
+been my dream, as I have roughed it in camps or tramped over glaciers,
+through forests, sleeping under the stars. And so I sent the little one
+to school in 'Frisco, Chicago, New York, with a European polishing off.
+And somehow, the further East she traveled the grander her notions
+grew--and as for myself, on my flying visits to her I took pride in
+seeing my girl hold her own with the daughters of oil, beef and railways
+trusts, and then with the daughters of princes of the Old World. And the
+luck held out. However grand Evie's whims, I always had the stuff to
+back her--and I always lived in hopes that any turn of the pick and
+shovel would yield me, not merely a rich clean-up, but the
+inexhaustible fortune that is every miner's dream. And so, between what
+Evie took for granted and what I told her, half in jest, there grew up
+this fable of the Rainbow Mine. But this season--I suppose it is my
+punishment for my deception--the luck has turned clean against me. The
+gold is here in the earth, as it always has been--but I've lost my knack
+of finding it. The old earth no longer trusts me with her secrets." He
+groaned, covering his face with his rough, knotted hands for a minute,
+during which young Pierce exclaimed, bitterly:
+
+"Then what is to become of me?"
+
+"Ah, well!" Recovering composure, Durant rose. "It won't do to loaf. I'm
+sorry for your disappointment, Walter. And the worst is, I can't do much
+for you; can't show you any hospitality. In order to maintain life till
+the luck turns, I am sharing the outfit of a chap named Blenksoe. That's
+he, yon." He indicated a man of evil aspect, who was lounging at the
+entrance of a rude hut nearby. "Blenksoe is grub-staking me through a
+superstition about my luck. But Blenksoe is a bad lot. You must not have
+anything to do with him."
+
+"But what in the world am I to do?" cried Pierce. "I tell you, I am
+penniless--penniless!"
+
+"You must work," Durant admonished. "You must get employment on a
+lay--that is, you must induce some one to let you help work his claim on
+shares. I'll teach you the trick of panning gold."
+
+"But if gold-dust can be taken out by the dish-pan," cried Walter, with
+bulging eyes, "why should any one go poor?"
+
+"You young fool! First you have to find in which patch out of desert
+areas of mud and cobblestone the gold-dust hides. And then you have to
+pay the Government for the privilege of staking, working it. Look along
+the banks of this creek. As far as eye can see every inch of pay-dirt is
+claimed, staked, defended, not only by law, but by miners' justice, with
+a shooting-iron. In a mining camp human life ain't worth a damn, as
+you'll find if you trespass on another man's claim, or if he should take
+a fancy to yours. Just be content if, for the present, by working
+eighteen hours of daylight during the twenty-four, during the short
+summer, you can pay your way."
+
+"Good heavens!" again cried Pierce. "Then are the stories of gold all a
+fable? Surely many fortunes are made up here?"
+
+"Surely," replied Durant, "and lost here, too. Every Klondike camp is
+the garden for a score of fortunes, and the graveyard of a thousand
+hopes. Well, I must go get pick and shovel." He moved toward his tent.
+"I must go out on the hills, prospecting. Thank God, I left my girl a
+tidy sum in the bank--and before that is spent her daddy will have found
+her Rainbow Mine--or will die like a trail-dog in the traces!"
+
+"I ought to tell you----" Walter detained him. "That money--Miss Durant
+has drawn it, every penny."
+
+"Eh!" exclaimed Durant. "Are you sure?"
+
+"It was that which set me thinking about coming up here myself. I heard
+her telling the cashier. You haven't paid her a visit for three years;
+accordingly, she intends coming to visit you as a surprise."
+
+"A surprise! My God!" gasped the unhappy man.
+
+"She has invested in the most costly outfit," continued Walter. "She is
+traveling with a princely retinue. You see, she thinks you live in regal
+style--palaces and all that."
+
+"And when----" Durant moistened his dry lips. "How soon----?"
+
+Pierce shrugged his shoulders. "I fell in with her party to-day, though
+as I was stone broke and hoofing it I didn't care to make myself known
+to her. She was inquiring your whereabouts. She is coming by the stage.
+She'll be here any minute now."
+
+The tooting of a horn echoed through the hills, mingled with bursts of
+girlish laughter, as, with a crack of the driver's whip and the jingling
+of bells, in a cloud of dust the stage was seen approaching. With a
+groan Durant buried his face in his hands. "My God!" he muttered.
+"Evelyn!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PICTURE GIRL
+
+
+"Let your light so shine----" At this cue the much-converted Ikey passed
+Gumboot Annie's frying-pan about among the men. Instead of
+organ-voluntary, or tenor solo, such as obtains during the offertory in
+conventional places of worship, the Bully, at his own request, rose to
+make a few appropriate remarks. "I ain't convarted," he frankly
+announced. "Heaven ain't in it with a hot old hell of a whoop-up time in
+this here life, d'ye see? Even if ye hang fer it! But say, parson,
+you're all right. You're a sure square proposition! Boys, the collection
+goes, d'ye see?"
+
+"You betcherlife!" with cordial emphasis acquiesced the boys, even as
+the orthodox respond Amen, while pouring gold-dust from their pokes into
+the frying-pan.
+
+"Oh, I don't despair of you, Nicholas! I shall yet see you a pillar of
+the church!" The minister now was mingling with his congregation,
+shaking hands, hearty if not invariably spotless, right and left. "Thank
+you, lads, thank you! This will go toward the maintenance of a hospital,
+where you shall be cared for when disabled by accident, or laid up with
+a er--touch of--ahem!--scurvy."
+
+"Booze," corrected Bully Nick, scorning the well-meant euphemism.
+
+After a second, informal benediction from Maclane, Barney, considering
+that the execution of justice temporal had been waived quite long enough
+in favor of things pertaining to the soul, tapped Nick on the shoulder
+with cheerful authority. "Now, me man, put your best fut forward and
+step prattily to jail! The rest av yez"--he looked round on the group
+with impartial invitation--"can accompany us on giniral lack av
+principles!"
+
+"Oh, but say--the stage is a-comin' in," remonstrated Bill, as the
+tooting of a distant horn echoed musically among the mountain passes.
+"There's like to be ladies aboard her. Can't we wait for to look upon
+the ladies?"
+
+The suggestion obviously was popular, even to the extent of suggesting
+mutiny if not complied with, and Barney himself had some difficulty in
+delaying his consent in order to add value to it before permitting his
+mug to relax into a grin. "As a man in line av promotion to be nominated
+an officer and a gintleman, 'tis no less than me duty."
+
+"Boys, boys!" Mops, who had been reconnoitering, ran back, breathless
+and excited. "There's gals aboard!"
+
+"The hell thar is!" exclaimed the boys, delighted, and meaning no
+disrespect.
+
+"A hull outfit o' gals," expatiated Mops. "And one, perched up by the
+driver, jest the swellest, jim-dandiest little female proposition you
+ever seen in all your life! Say, I wisht I hadn't left my dress-suit in
+cold storage!"
+
+"Any one lend me a comb?" Any one being unable to oblige him, Bill ran a
+corkscrew through his curly hair. "Well, anyway, my face is clean!"
+
+"All ye can see av it, for the dhirt that's on it," Barney encouraged
+him.
+
+The horn blew a gay fanfare; the driver's whip cracked with more than
+wonted smartness; the bells on its four horses jingled merrily as the
+cumbersome old stage rattled into Lost Shoe Creek, and drew up before
+Gumboot Annie's hostelry to an enthusiastic ovation of hurrahs,
+cap-tossings, and gun-firings from the male populace.
+
+A handsome girl, wearing her modish clothes with a too conscious effect
+of style, from her place on the box bowed pleased acknowledgments in all
+directions for the cheering, but at the volley of shots gave a little
+startled cry, which was taken up in louder note by her companions.
+
+Doffing his hat, Parson Maclane came forward, with a reassuring smile.
+"Only a Klondike welcome, young ladies," he explained.
+
+"That's what!" the men confirmed him. "A Klondike welcome!"
+
+"How quite too utterly charming!" exclaimed the young lady. "Girls!
+Sarah!" she appealed to the others of the party. "Aren't they too dear
+and picturesque for anything!" That "they" were human beings and not
+part of the brilliant panorama seemed hardly to occur to her.
+
+A score of pairs of rough but willing hands stretched up to help the
+speaker from her high throne, but the honor fell to Scarlett, or rather
+was appropriated by that masterful young man as, putting the other
+aspirants aside, he lifted her over the wheel and swung her lightly to
+the ground. Without waiting for her thanks he returned to his
+wood-chopping with a sense of one of life's minor miracles upon him. "By
+St. Bridget!" he was thinking, "but that's my picture-girl!"
+
+When all the passengers had alighted safely the boys pushed their leader
+to the front. "Speech! Speech! Bully Nick!" they insisted. "Speech!"
+
+"Take my hat off fer me," in an undertone commanded the champion shot
+and orator. When one of his lieutenants had hastened to comply, the
+Bully stood forth and cleared his throat. "Ladies, in the name of the
+district--and never mind jest at these presents what name the district
+bears--I regret I can't give ye the glad hand, through bein' a-wearin'
+of th' Government bracelets."
+
+"The Government bracelets," repeated the beautiful young lady, puzzled,
+under cover of the guffaws with which his followers received Nick's
+initial witticism.
+
+"Mary, love----" She appealed to the tallest of the girls who stood
+about her. "You are up in political economy?"
+
+"I think he must mean some official decoration," glibly prompted Mary.
+
+"That's it," corroborated Nick, unashamed, amid the shame-faced laughter
+of his followers. "Official decoration fer proficiency in gun-play!" He
+held up his handcuffed hands.
+
+"Oh!" The girl and her companions recoiled instinctively.
+
+"My dears!" The minister stepped into the breach. "I assure you,
+Nicholas here has the warmest heart, though at times he is a
+trifle--er--impulsive."
+
+"Aye!" Nick nodded. "Impulsive, under the influence of bad liquor. Shot
+a chap recent when drunk, me and him alike. Not but what he desarved it
+all right, though the blamed Government won't see it in that light. But
+never mind them little personal details. Let me present the boys. Step
+up, lads. This here is Mops, our masher. Only hez ter look at a mess of
+pertatoes to rejuce 'em. Tuk a prize once at a beauty show, there bein'
+no other contestants, and the judge havin' been struck blind."
+
+"Oh, stop yer joshin'!" growled Mops, as, with a red face, he nearly
+lost his balance in a bow.
+
+"And Bill. Bill's our dude," explained the Bully. "Won't use nothin' but
+fashion-plates ter patch his breeches. Now, Bill, don't turn yer back on
+the ladies, else they'll see that what I say is true. And this here
+solemn guy is Sandy, who keeps everything that comes his way, except the
+Commandments, and takes whatever he can lay hands on, except a joke." A
+few more introductions having been achieved in the same style, "Well,
+well, I guess we're a rough, tough lot," concluded Nick.
+
+"Nature's noblemen, my dear," interpolated the minister. "The dearest
+souls, except for an occasional regrettable--ahem----"
+
+"Spree!" shouted the Bully. "But that, take it all in all, is a good
+sign. When bedrock's too smooth you won't find gold. Gawd knows we're
+tough--but when women comes among us--good women----" He broke off to
+pass a ragged sleeve across his eyes and gulp. "They're welcome as
+pay-dirt, and honored as queens."
+
+"That's what! You betcherlife!" emphatically assented the throng.
+
+"Thank you! thank you!" replied the beautiful young lady. "I must
+introduce myself. I come from New York. My name is Evelyn Durant----"
+
+"'Rah, 'rah, for Evelyn!" shouted Mops, to his own surprise and the
+general admiration.
+
+"And these young friends of mine"--Miss Durant indicated the six plainly
+dressed little maids who were drinking in these wonderful happenings,
+like children in a fairy dream--"their names are Mary, Ruth, Ethel,
+Kate, Effie and Gertrude, They have come with me for a holiday from the
+institution where they live. They are orphans."
+
+A round of cheers was thereupon called for, for Mary, Ruth, Ethel, Kate,
+Effie and Gertrude, and clinched with Barney's flattering assertion,
+"An' sure this is the idayal asoilum for thim, and may they prosper and
+multiply galeor, for divvle a family in the disthrict can brag av an
+orphan of its own at all, more shame to us!"
+
+"And this," Evelyn tapped a stout, middle-aged woman kindly on the
+shoulder, "is my faithful maid, Sarah."
+
+Sarah having been duly cheered, "Sarah is nae bonny, but she micht be
+sonsy and of a savin' disposeetion," commended Sandy, cautiously, for
+which encomium, however, he was only rewarded by an angry shake of
+Sarah's stout umbrella, with a counsel to keep his cheek to himself or
+she'd know the reason why.
+
+These graceful amenities concluded, "We have come all this way to visit
+my father," explained Miss Durant. "But it is far harder to find him
+than I should have expected, considering how well known he is. But I'm
+sure you can help me."
+
+"Sure!" cried her hearers. "You betcher-boots on that!"
+
+"And who may be your dad, lady?" inquired one. "Some crackerjack swell
+capitalist, I reckon."
+
+At this, a gaunt, elderly man, who had kept in the background, leaning
+against a tree, and taking no part in the proceedings, shifted his
+position, uneasily.
+
+"Well," said the young lady, with a conscious laugh, and the
+condescension of one who might boast descent from Santa Claus, "I
+suppose every one in these parts is familiar with the name of Matthew
+Durant."
+
+"Matthew Durant!" The owner of the name did not claim it, and Scarlett
+and Barney, who, of the onlookers, alone could have identified him,
+recognizing the tragedy that was being enacted before them, also were
+silent. Meanwhile the prospectors, after scratching perplexed heads and
+ransacking memories in vain, denied all knowledge of the man.
+
+"Maybe he warks his proposeetion as a company, leddy," suggested Sandy.
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" Miss Durant flouted the notion. "My father is It!"
+
+The man leaning against the Douglas spruce, his ragged cap drawn down
+over his eyes, groaned slightly, and turning away, looked toward the
+distant mountains, while overhead a bird trilled blithely.
+
+"Let me see if I can describe him," his daughter was saying, in her
+sweet, assured young voice. "He is tall, erect----"
+
+Durant's bowed shoulders bowed themselves still lower.
+
+"He is clean-shaven----"
+
+Durant felt his unkempt beard.
+
+"He always dresses in the height of fashion. He's quite a dude, I tell
+him."
+
+Durant laughed outright.
+
+"And I think him extremely handsome!"
+
+"Sure; judging by his darter!" cried Mops, gallantly. "Oh, I don't mean
+that!" he hastened to add, fearful of having been too free.
+
+"Oh, but I don't mind your meaning it," laughed Evelyn. "But come, if
+you've never met my father surely you all know his mine--the wonderful
+Rainbow Mine."
+
+There was a pregnant pause, and then the Bully spoke, slowly,
+impressively. "I never knowed an out-an'-out prospector that didn't own
+the wonderfullest mine goin'--only waiting fer a triflin' circumstance
+like capital ter come along from the East and open it up and put it on a
+payin' basis. Why, every man Jack of us owns a placer claim, or
+hydraulicking concession, a silver or a copper mountain or a glut of
+gold or summat that entitles him to be It. Why, this here little
+beggar," he jerked his head toward Bill, "he claims he owns an antimony
+proposition that if developed ull make J. Peerpunt Morgan take a back
+seat and Hetty Green look like thirty cents----"
+
+"No 'if' about it. You betcherlife it will!" cried Bill, with warmth.
+
+"Aye!" The Bully nodded his head, condoningly. "And Sandy here claims
+ter have an option on a----"
+
+"A copper proposeetion, pure boanite," elucidated Sandy.
+
+"Aye! Something that's a-goin' ter make Clark of Montana bust with envy
+some day," assented Nick, "and knock Newhouse of Salt Lake City inter a
+cocked hat. Why, tho' by nacher conservative an' shrinking I myself am
+calkilatin' on stackin' up the chips--I mean the books, ag'in Andy
+Carnegie, and pourin' oil on the troubled waters of John D.
+Rockefeller's poverty, unless he's run in fust! Take my word fer it,
+missy, every man within range of them bright eyes of yourn is a
+millionaire--ter-morrer! A stun-broke millionaire!"
+
+"But, you see, my father is a millionaire to-day," explained Miss
+Durant, with amused tolerance. "A multi-millionaire."
+
+Nick shrugged his shoulders. "Lucky father!"
+
+"Why, that's his camp name," Evelyn exclaimed. "Lucky! He has often
+told me. Surely you all know Lucky?"
+
+[Illustration: MINGLED WITH THE TRAVELLERS AT GUMBOOT ANNIE'S BOARD.]
+
+There was a dead silence, broken only by the fly-catcher's mocking
+refrain, every man with wonderful restraint and delicacy avoiding so
+much as a glance toward Durant.
+
+Then, again, Nick rose to the occasion, manfully. "Why, ter be sure!
+Everybody knows Lucky, and Lucky's Rainbow Mine, eh, boys? Blast yer,
+can't yer _say_ yer does?" he demanded, in an undertone that would have
+been backed up with a shooting-iron had his hands been free.
+
+But of their own accord the boys, their presence of mind recovered, all
+were loyally assuring Miss Durant that Lucky and Lucky's mine were
+synonyms for boundless wealth at Lost Shoe Creek and throughout the
+golden northland. "The mere mention of it brings better fortin' than
+touchin' a hunchback, or spittin' on your money at new moon," one summed
+up.
+
+"Too bad, but Lucky ain't here just now," the Bully went on to state,
+with an authority that, handcuffed though he was, not even the most
+audacious would have dared dispute. "An' what's more, tain't so easy ter
+locate him. Like as not he's off, attendin' ter them vast interests of
+his'n somewhar out among them hills!" He nodded, toward the
+hoary-beaded mountains as if defying their granitic silence to gainsay
+him.
+
+"Sure he is!" corroborated the prospectors, in a chorus, covering up the
+long-drawn sigh of relief that nearly betrayed Durant.
+
+"Prospectors is here ter-day, and gone ter-morrer, like the snow, d'ye
+see?" concluded Nick. "But he'll turn up in time all right, fer fair,
+with a pokeful of dust in his corjeroys, and a train of mules loaded
+down with nuggets fer his gal!"
+
+"Sure! That's what! Betchersweetlife!" cried the boys, who lacked their
+leader's skill in improvising lies, but knew a good one when they heard
+it.
+
+"Oh, thank you, thank you so much!" Evelyn had begun to feel real
+uneasiness at the continued postponements in arriving at her journey's
+end or obtaining definite intelligence of her father. "And when I join
+him I shall tell him what a welcome you have given me. And I promise you
+he shall back everybody's proposition. I promise every one of you a
+substantial slice of our good fortune in the Rainbow Mine."
+
+Comment on this generous pledge was headed off by Ikey's vigorous
+ringing of the supper-bell, coupled with an announcement from Gumboot
+Annie that for a dollar within the tent might be obtained a meal
+calculated to turn the mother of the Delmonicos the colors of a lettuce
+and tomato salad from professional jealousy, on which, at Evelyn's
+invitation and with Barney's willing concurrence, the execution of
+justice temporal again was stayed, while Nick and his followers, with
+their custodian, mingled with the travelers at Gumboot Annie's board.
+There the Bully's manacled efforts to devour bacon and flapjacks
+particularly delighted the young ladies, who took turns in cutting up
+his food for him, while he himself was moved almost to tears that his
+last victim could not be present to share the joy their late
+unpleasantness was procuring for himself as the survivor.
+
+Durant followed them to the entrance of the tent where, unnoticed, he
+lingered a few minutes, listening to the hum of merry voices, and
+feasting his sad eyes upon his girl, then turned despairingly away.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+EVELYN ENGAGES A COURIER
+
+
+While, as he knew, his identity was suspected by Nick and Nick's gang,
+yet, so long as these were at supper his disguise enabled Scarlett to
+wander through the camp, as if seeking employment, and reconnoitre in
+order to ascertain what were the most flagrant examples of law-breaking
+industries with which, officially, he would have to deal. Meanwhile, his
+thoughts kept straying toward the picture-girl with pleasure in the
+thought of her fascinating proximity, not unmingled with criticism of
+her large assumption of little dignities, softened, however, with pity
+for the bitter disappointment in store for her when she should learn the
+true state of her father's affairs.
+
+As it would be manifestly impossible for her to continue under the
+delusion that hers was the purse of Fortunatus to draw on, the
+obviously wisest plan would be for Durant to disclose himself to her
+without delay, confess the truth, and either arrange for her to remain
+with him, sharing his rough lot, should she have the grit so to do, or
+take up a collection to send her back to any friends who might be
+willing to give her a home until, if ever, his luck should turn again.
+For his own part, however, both as official and man, Sergeant Scarlett
+was strongly of opinion that it would be an unholy act to allow a bevy
+of girls to leave a district so sorely needing them, above all when
+among their number was the girl of girls whom no young man can fail to
+recognize the moment he sets eyes on her; or, as in his case, even on
+her portrait. Accordingly, a thousand schemes passed through his head
+for making the wilderness, in spite of straitened means and harsh
+conditions, an acceptable habitation to the newcomers. The first step
+was to take counsel with Evelyn's father, but when, after making his
+duty rounds of inspection, he returned to the neighborhood of Gumboot
+Annie's hostelry, Durant had disappeared, nor did inquiry reveal the
+slightest trace of him.
+
+Scarlett's next idea was formally to present himself to Miss Durant and
+proffer his services in finding her party suitable accommodations till
+her father could be reached. Just as he arrived at this decision the
+travelers came from the tent. Approaching Evelyn, with a military salute
+less effectively seconded than he could have desired by the battered
+apology for a hat that he was wearing, he was about to accost her, when,
+to his surprise, she waved him imperiously aside.
+
+"Out of the way, my good man. I wish to speak with the officer."
+
+At this, Barney, who was engaged in lining up his prisoners for the
+march to headquarters, came forward, with a flattered grin. "Out av the
+way, ye hulkin' vagabone!" he ordered his superior, with a rough shove
+that filled Scarlett with wrath, and sent Nick and his men, who every
+moment were becoming surer of the equivoque, into loud guffaws.
+
+"I tell you, I never give indiscriminately to beggars," stated Miss
+Durant, as the young man seemed inclined to persist. "Kate, love," she
+beckoned a serious-looking young girl, "investigate his case."
+
+Kate wrinkled up her conscientious eyebrows. "His face is very red," she
+whispered Evelyn, "but somehow I don't think it's drink."
+
+"Let him wait, then," ordained Evelyn, "and I'll see about him myself.
+Meanwhile--oh, officer, I want your help! I'm in such a pickle for lack
+of a man servant," she went on to confide in Barney. "The French courier
+I brought out with me deserted the moment we set foot in Skagway, taking
+my camera, automobile, and I don't know what besides. Of course, my
+father will see to it that he's found and punished--and the things don't
+matter, because, till my own are recovered, they can be replaced. But
+the difficulty is to replace Alphonse. I never before saw so many idle
+and poverty-stricken men in all my life; yet--it's the strangest
+thing--no matter what inducements I offer, no one is willing to take
+service with me."
+
+"Myself, I don't think it much loss, miss," Evelyn's maid struck in.
+"That Alphonse was too tight-laced to be of any good use. And, anyway,
+for my part I don't think it respectable for a man to wear corsets any
+more than for a woman to go without 'em."
+
+"Oh, it's not Alphonse's usefulness I mourn for," admitted Miss Durant.
+"It's the appearance of the thing; the _chic_. My father always likes me
+to have the best of everything; and I owe it to his position no less
+than to my own dignity to travel in the best style. Officer," again she
+appealed to Barney, "can't you recommend me a courier?"
+
+Barney looked his bewilderment. "Is it a currier for the horses av your
+automeboiler ye do be wanting, miss?"
+
+Perceiving in this breach his opportunity, Scarlett stepped boldly into
+it. "May I apply for the position? I'm looking for work."
+
+"Lookin' for throuble, more like," muttered Barney, with solicitude.
+"Wid all thim lasses! Begorra, I know the sect."
+
+Evelyn turned about and surveyed the speaker critically. "Ah, I'm glad
+it's employment and not alms you want," she commended the busiest, most
+hardworked official in the district. "But--I wonder--are you qualified?"
+Into her pretty eyes there crept a look of doubt.
+
+"I know something about horses," with truth the Mounted Policeman
+assured her.
+
+"But not about lasses," Barney anxiously tugged at his sleeve. "'Tis
+them as leads ye the divvle av a ride, and is like as not to run away
+wid ye."
+
+"H'm!" Evelyn considered the matter. The shaggy picturesqueness of the
+prospectors in colored flannel shirts, top boots and corduroys, with
+hands ever on gun or pistol, their odd phrase and lurid expletive,
+touched the silly streak of romanticism in her as had they been chorus
+of an opera in which she found herself enacting the star role, but this
+clean-skinned young man, with unadorned speech, in commonplace,
+work-a-day clothes, at first failed to interest her.
+
+"H'm! Well," she conceded finally, "I'm something of a judge of people.
+Step into the light where we can take a good look at you."
+
+As Scarlett obeyed, "There!" cried little Kate, triumphantly. "The nice,
+modest way he changes color, I'm sure he doesn't drink!"
+
+Evelyn also noticed, as who could fail to do, the ingenuous blush that
+overspread the white crescent of the young giant's brow, and it
+flattered her woman's love of power. "Well, girls," she demanded, in an
+audible aside, "and what do you think of him?"
+
+The verdict of the orphans was unanimous; they thought him fine,
+Gertrude, who would have been frivolous and slangy had her institution
+permitted it, pronouncing him "a peach." Sarah alone challenged him.
+
+"He's a sassy piece," she informed Evelyn. "Look at him now, fit to
+burst with laughter at us! I never heard of a decent man-servant that
+couldn't keep his face straight."
+
+"But if I'm not straight-faced and strait-laced like Alphonse," urged
+Scarlett, "at least ye can count on me never to take French leave of
+ye."
+
+Sarah shook her head ominously. "He's too young, miss," she warned
+Evelyn. "Far too young."
+
+"But I'm growing older every day," pleaded the postulant, "and up here
+the days are so long, one grows old twice as fast."
+
+"He has too much command of language for a man-servant, miss," insisted
+Sarah. "That kind is apt to put on airs above their station. And--look
+at him now!--there's something altogether too masterful about the way he
+walks."
+
+"Ah, that comes from soldiering," the young man explained. "Me legs are
+always under arms, as it were."
+
+Evelyn laughed with a distinct prepossession. "What is your name?" she
+inquired.
+
+"Scarlett."
+
+"Scarlett what?"
+
+"It's what Scarlett."
+
+"Eh? What do you sign yourself--that is, can you write?"
+
+"Oh, I manage to make me mark with my fist on any human document that
+gets in my way. I sign myself J. Scarlett."
+
+"Oh! And what does J stand for?"
+
+"Gerald."
+
+"Gerald! How do you spell it?"
+
+"The usual way. G-e-r-a-l-d."
+
+"Then, why do you sign it J?"
+
+"Oh, that's just a mistake other people make in the pronunciation," the
+owner of the name elucidated, to his own if not to his hearer's
+satisfaction. "It once nearly cost me a lawsuit to establish it."
+
+Sarah groaned: "He talks for all the world like an Irishman."
+
+"Murther will out," Barney proclaimed, with pride.
+
+Evelyn turned on the owner of Dunshinnanon. "Are you Irish?"
+
+"It's the best excuse my parents could make for me," admitted Scarlett.
+
+"I am more than half inclined to take him on trial," Evelyn stated. "But
+first," she again consulted Barney, "officer, can you give the young man
+a character?"
+
+"A character? Faith, but that's phwat he does be needing some ginerously
+minded person to bestow on him, for niver a wan av his own has he to
+show at all, at all!" cried Barney, mindful of his chief's earlier
+injunctions to depict him in unflattered lights. "Glory be! If I was to
+begin to tell yez phwat I don't know about the lad he'd be afther
+breaking my skull for me, an' not for the first toime."
+
+"Nor the last, either, you idiot!" growled Scarlett.
+
+"That's rather vague," commented Evelyn. "Tell me, is he honest?"
+
+"Gosh! th' Irish is no thieves," Barney answered handsomely for his
+race, "though now and thin maybe wan might snap at something in your
+hand. It takes a dhirty Hollander to do the stealin'!"
+
+"Oh! And--is he sober?"
+
+"Sober! A pure-blooded Celt like himself!" Wishing still to carry out
+Scarlett's first orders, Barney hotly repudiated the charge of damaging
+sobriety on his behalf, but warned by a surreptitious kick that he was
+exceeding instructions, he softened it by asking, generally: "Wid a
+felly like himself, that dhrunk or sober is aqually an omadhaun, phwat
+the divvle is the differ?" And Scarlett also pleaded his own cause by
+admitting that he was frequently quite sober, though, thanks be! never
+to an intemperate degree.
+
+Sarah groaned portentously, but the missionary spirit was awakening in
+Evelyn. "I can put up with a good deal," she asserted, "if I feel I am
+giving employment where it is really needed. But I must first know
+where I stand. Is this young person reliable, to be depended on in an
+emergency?"
+
+"You betcherlife on that!" yelled the prospectors, in delighted chorus.
+As outlaws, the mounted policeman was their natural enemy, but for the
+time he had downed them, as in the long run, they, by instinct, realized
+he always would down them, and they respected him.
+
+"You stake yer bottom plunk on it, d'ye see? He's the only man ever got
+me skinned forty ways from the Jack," in a generous climax conceded
+Bully Nick.
+
+Evelyn's pretty face was clouded with perplexity. Categorically there
+was no specific charge against the applicant; moreover, the longer she
+looked at him the more was she impressed with the promise of strength in
+his splendid proportions, the resolute chin, clear, friendly eyes, even
+though the corners of a mobile mouth did curl as if with perpetual
+laughter in an outlook on life too original to be seemly in a wearer of
+livery--yet, evidently, something was being withheld from her. Urged,
+however, by all the little orphans, who by this time were in love with
+Scarlett, she remarked: "Yes, we must remember that we came up here not
+only for our own pleasure, but also to do good. I am tempted to take
+the young man on a month's trial, and at least endeavor to reform him.
+That is, if---- Officer," she again consulted Barney, "is he really the
+best protector you can find for us?"
+
+Pushing his hat back from a brow heated by such unwonted drafts upon its
+thinking powers, Barney scratched his head while regarding his superior
+with disparagement. Finally, "well, yis, he is," he admitted, as if it
+were the last damnatory word to be spoken of the man.
+
+Having ascertained that something over a dollar a day and his keep was
+as much as he was used to in the way of wage, Miss Durant instructed her
+new courier in his duties--"to look after our trunks, bicycles, banjos,
+pianola, mandolins----"
+
+"And the pets, dear," put in Ruth, who was rather tired of trying to
+keep the peace between an Angora cat and a canary, a parrot that looked
+as if it had a wicked past and a bull pup who wished to include the
+parrot, past and all, in his present rampageous scheme of life.
+
+"Oh, of course the menagerie! Then you must go ahead to engage the best
+suites for us at the hotels, and----"
+
+"And follow ye to pick up the articles ye leave behind," Scarlett
+nodded, understandingly. "But till we get fairly started, I'll just
+accompany ye."
+
+"Very well," assented Evelyn. "Sarah, I hope you won't mind having the
+young man eat with you while we are traveling?"
+
+"I suppose it can't be helped, miss," gloomily replied the maid. "I only
+hope the young man will have the grace to improve the opportunity."
+
+"Oh, I'll improve it fast enough," promised Scarlett, with a twinkling
+eye on Sarah, "so long as ye don't expect me to embrace it."
+
+Evelyn cut short the maid's angry reproof. "Now, Gerald, you must keep
+your place. Conduct us to the nearest large city. We must telegraph my
+father to join us there. Meanwhile, we want to do a lot of shopping. We
+want, oh, ever so many things! Girls, which of you has my list?"
+
+"I put down prizes for our bridge parties," cried Effie, her eyes
+snapping at the thought of the unhallowed joys in store for her.
+
+"And materials for making fudge," whispered Ethel, who had thirty-two
+sweet teeth.
+
+"Yes," assented Evelyn. "And we must buy presents: neckties and things
+for the poor dear miners who have been so kind to us. Also cotillion
+favors. As soon as we are settled I mean to give a ball."
+
+"But, miss, how about money?" Sarah reminded her. "We have only
+fifty-odd dollars left."
+
+"Oh, we can have things charged!" cried Evelyn, airily. "My father's
+name will be letter of credit to any amount."
+
+Scarlett looked about with a growing uneasiness. The day was fast
+subsiding into the long twilight that precedes the short northern summer
+night. Barney had departed with his captives on the long march that was
+the most effective object-lesson conceivable in what could be
+accomplished in policing a district by but two men, with the might of a
+Government behind; and here was he, practically alone, save for the
+minister, to guard these women, since, as he shrewdly guessed, in an
+emergency the courage of the other passengers traveling by the coach
+would prove of negligible quality. The horses had been put into harness
+some time before, yet the driver kept delaying their departure on the
+most trivial pretexts. On this Gumboot Annie, when appealed to, threw a
+lurid local color. "Guess Logan is timin' things fer the hold-up."
+
+"The hold-up!" in alarm, exclaimed the passengers, who enjoyed these
+things better on billboards forthsetting Bowery melodrama. "You don't
+mean to say they really have hold-ups in these parts?"
+
+Gumboot Annie spat deliberately before replying, "Why, that's our
+specialty."
+
+"But the driver--does not the driver defend his passengers?"
+
+"The driver! Now wouldn't thet jostle yer!" demanded Gumboot Annie of
+the mountains. "Logan hes ter stand in with the gang ter save his own
+skin. And, mind you folks don't make no fuss. Pass in yer checks an' no
+jawin', and the boys won't hurt yer none. But if yer squeal--well, it's
+none of my funeral."
+
+Great consternation prevailed among the passengers who had booked to
+Camp Perdu, the stage's next destination, and elaborate were the
+preparations they made to conceal their valuables. The bills and
+gold-dust Maclane had collected for his hospital he skilfully packed
+into his moccasin, while, to the general amusement, Sarah bestowed
+Evelyn's ready money in the fauna and flora of her own bonnet.
+
+"It's my belief the woman only said that to frighten us," decided Evelyn
+as, with a flourish of his horn, the driver shouted, "All aboard!" And
+as the stage rumbled peacefully along she added: "In any case, our
+party is safe. Our courier will protect us!" In no respect, however,
+were her predictions justified. Hardly was Lost Shoe Creek left behind
+when from the bushes by the wayside sprang a band of men, with hats
+drawn over their faces, pistols in hand, bidding the driver halt.
+
+It was the most systematic proceeding in the world, reducing the bandits
+to the level of petty tradesmen, and their victims to that of unwilling
+contributors to a recognized if oppressive impost. Not one of the former
+offered to spare the fair sex on condition its fairest representative
+should tread with him the stately measure of a minuet; not one of the
+latter invoked the memory of the former's spotless childhood hallowed by
+a mother's caresses beneath an old oaken bucket or spreading chestnut
+tree. Instead, Logan wound the reins about the whip as this stood in its
+socket, and held up his hands, though without ceasing to chew the straw
+in his mouth, while the passengers under invitation apparently no more
+coercive than that of the average trolley car conductor to step lively
+or move up, dismounted and stood with uplifted arms while methodically
+relieved of purses, watches and the like. Terror tied the women's
+tongues, while the men, knowing the futility of remonstrance, were
+silent. Only Scarlett, while submitting with the rest, ventured on a
+lively sally or so that called down on him a few curses or served to
+provoke a laugh that later helped him in identifying the malefactors.
+But not a word of importance was uttered on either side till the leader
+of the gang, surveying the pile of loot, muttered, discontentedly:
+"Well, this is a blamed mean crowd! Go over 'em again!"
+
+It was then Scarlett took a quick decision. Little as passivity suited
+his fighting manhood; much as, in his own phrase, it pained him to
+Evelyn's appealing glances to turn a deaf ear, he knew that to offer the
+slightest resistance would be to forfeit his own life and leave the
+womenkind to a fate one dared not think of calmly. Nevertheless, when at
+the second overhauling he saw her jeweled belt and studs torn rudely
+from her he could not forbear a movement of impatience that drew to
+himself the serious attention of the robbers.
+
+"Say, young feller"--one pressed the cold muzzle of a pistol to his
+forehead--"air you in an all-fired hurry ter see yer affairs wound up?"
+
+"Oh, as to that," he answered, "ye can wind up me affairs and welcome if
+ye'll take the time. They're just the Waterbury watch inside me
+pocket."
+
+The ruffian laughed, and told him he could keep his worthless timepiece
+for his wit, but Evelyn shuddered with a disgust that gave her voice.
+"The pitiful coward! When I took it for granted you would risk your life
+for me!"
+
+"Faith, but I'm not dying to be corpse at me own wake," jeered Scarlett.
+"For a lady I might risk my life, but not for the dust the reverend
+gentleman is treading under foot, nor for the greenbacks sprouting from
+yonder good woman's botanical headpiece!"
+
+Shrieks from the women, groans and reproaches from the men, denounced
+this treachery, as the bonnet of the protesting Sarah yielded up its
+riches and the minister in heartbroken silence suffered himself,
+perforce, to be despoiled, while old Blenksoe, taken off his guard, in
+his natural tones cried, approvingly, "Ah, thet's somethin' like!"
+
+As they hurriedly packed their loot, "Rustle, boys," in undertones,
+warned the leader, "else we shall have that blasted M. P. of a Scarlett
+on our backs!" His caution came none too soon. At Scarlett's
+instigation, Barney had contrived to get word to Perdu, and just as the
+robbers had cleared into the jungle with their booty an armed delegation
+of citizens appeared upon the scene. As the victims were left penniless,
+Dave Hastie, proprietor of the Grand Hotel, offered them gratuitous
+hospitality for the approaching night, a kindness that was accepted only
+too gladly.
+
+"But before we start," cried Evelyn, amid general acclamation, "I wish
+to denounce a coward, a poltroon, a traitor! A contemptible being whose
+betrayal of those who trusted him should not go unscathed. Creature,"
+she turned on her smiling courier, "have you no sense of shame?"
+
+"Sure, but I have," he answered. "Never a day passes that I don't blush
+for human nature in the lump!"
+
+Evelyn sighed, and again addressed the delegation of Perdu's Law and
+Order League, who, having missed the robbers, were fairly spoiling with
+eagerness to kill the next best man. "He never so much as lifted a
+finger to defend us," she explained.
+
+"Oh, but I did! All ten of them," he defended himself, in injured tones.
+
+"It's only what one might expect," Sarah harangued the throng, "taking
+on a scallywag without character or references. Practically robbing miss
+here of every penny of ready money she possesses, and damaging this
+bunnet that I got at a reduction off of a lady friend as has set up a
+swell millinery establishment in Sixth Avenue."
+
+"He delivered us to our enemies!" There were tears in Maclane's voice.
+"He stripped the sick, the suffering; turned into channels of vice the
+contributions for my hospital."
+
+All agreed that hanging was too good for the culprit, and some were in
+favor of lynching. One consideration alone deterred them from extreme
+measures, even while a rope was being hunted for among the skunk
+willows, sage and wild lupin by the road: namely, the unpopularity of
+such punitive proceedings with the Mounted Policeman newly appointed to
+the district.
+
+"Times is sadly changed, boys," the leader reminded the delegation. "The
+gentlemanly way with us has allus bin ter choke off a traitor's last
+prayers with a hempen Amen. But this blamed M. P. is as apt ter pinch
+the gentlemen as acts impulsive in a little lynchin' matter as quick as
+he'd pinch a criminal. Thar's only two of 'em," he explained to the
+travelers, "the Sergeant and his man--but the way the feller covers
+distances--his horse has seven-leagued boots for sure! Now, as president
+of Perdu's Peace Committee and Law and Order League, I'd claim it my
+proud privilege ter fit the noose ter this young rascal's neck--but as
+husband to a good woman and father to her kids I don't want ter run up
+contrairy-wise agin Scarlett of the Mounted!"
+
+"Very well," decided Evelyn. "I myself am in favor of government. I
+belong to several ladies' associations for upholding clean streets and
+economy in the Mayor's office and things like that. From what you say,
+this--I didn't catch the Mounted Policeman's name, but he obviously must
+be an officer; and though with us, in New York, policemen, even mounted
+ones, have no standing in Society, yet, in his way, he must be a
+gentleman. Then let this miserable fellow be bound and taken before him
+for sentence. I myself will press the charge against him."
+
+"Good business," applauded the delegation, heartily.
+
+But as they were about to bind the prisoner with a rope taken from the
+skeleton of a wretched horse that some inferior brute of a human being
+had put to purposes of transportation under conditions for which nature
+had never intended it, the Irishman put them lightly aside.
+
+"One moment, please. Now that ye've wisely decided to postpone
+suspending the judged, also, as a famous American in a crisis once
+remarked, suspend judgment. All the accusations brought against me are
+dead true, which is why ye are alive to make them. I assisted in the
+despoiling of ye, on business principles, sacrificing small sums to one
+ten times their combined amounts. For under my own right foot I carry a
+sum that will not only replace Sarah's bonnet, greenbacks and all, but
+also reimburse the hospital with a little contribution of my own to
+boot."
+
+As he spoke, he drew a roll of ready money from its hiding place and
+handed some bills over to the astonished maid and the no less astonished
+minister. "The rest, a draft, I am commissioned to deposit in the bank
+on account of one Durant, now absent on a prospecting trip, for the
+maintenance, till he returns, of his daughter----"
+
+A loud chorus of surprise, admiration, gratitude interrupted the young
+man who was now hero of the hour.
+
+The League enrolled him an honorary member on the spot. To his terror,
+three depressed women with bundles wanted to kiss him for his mother,
+while Maclane, on behalf of all the disabled people in the district,
+nearly wrung his hand off. As breaking away he started to make his
+escape, Evelyn detained him. "My preserver," she cried, in impassioned
+tones, "let me reward you!"
+
+And when Scarlett, laughing, shook his head, refusing a moiety of his
+own ready money that, at Evelyn's direction, Sarah was proffering him,
+"Then at least tell me your name--for in the excitement I am ashamed to
+say I have clean forgotten it."
+
+"Yes, yes," insisted the group, "your name!"
+
+"'Tis the same as it has always been," he answered, blithely, turning on
+his heel. "I haven't changed it yet. Any time ye want me just ask at
+headquarters for Himself, for Scarlett of the Mounted."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+EVELYN SEEKS COUNSEL
+
+
+A few days later Evelyn, accompanied by Sarah, knocked at the door of
+St. Andrew's Mission, near Perdu. An Indian woman opened to her, and on
+her asking for Mr. Maclane, the minister came forward with a cordial
+welcome.
+
+"I won't invite you in, since just at present my study is in requisition
+as a hospital, and in any case you will doubtless prefer the veranda
+with its vista of the mountains."
+
+"And your lovely garden," added Evelyn, glancing at the beds in which
+vegetables and ornamental plants were growing in orderly profusion. "I
+never supposed that cultivation was possible so far north."
+
+"That is a common mistake," replied the minister. "But it is the same
+with plants as with people: wherever it is possible for them to grow it
+is intended that they should be cultivated; by which I do not mean that
+we should take the nature out of them, teaching them tricks and
+artificial ways; I mean that we should improve the conditions
+surrounding them, in order that their natural tendencies and activities
+may have the widest scope for beneficent purposes."
+
+"And yet"--Evelyn looked up and down the road--"you seem to be almost
+the only one who recognizes these possibilities. All the cabins seem to
+have been dropped in uncompromising rows along the highways, as if they
+were so many children's toys taken out of cardboard boxes labeled 'Made
+in Germany'."
+
+"Ah, most of the folk who come here are so busily engrossed in spading
+up the soil for treasure they have no time to till and sow. Yet our
+short summer of long days is capable of harvests that would yield pure
+gold in a land of canned supplies, where men get to long for green food
+as for water in the desert. Metz, the pioneer baker of Perdu, a
+far-sighted German, is raking in the gold-dust that other men
+laboriously pan out, by the sackful, simply by adding a fresh lettuce
+leaf, or radish, to every plate of fried eggs and bacon that he serves.
+Brackett of Atlin is famous for the beauty of his poppy patch that
+blazes like a banner on a dusty mountainside, no less than for the
+succulence of the turnips with which he regales his friends, all grown
+on a tiny corner of an auriferous claim that overhangs the sluiceboxes.
+Dr. Milne of Dawson received a prize for the tomatoes and celery he took
+down from his far-north home to the exposition in Victoria, on the
+occasion of the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Indeed, there
+was a story going the rounds that on the third day of the exposition,
+when the good doctor wanted to substitute fresh produce for his own,
+which, by that time had wilted, he could find none in Victoria to match
+their size. And I myself am not a little proud of my own sweet-peas."
+He handed Evelyn the fragrant blossoms he had been cutting as he talked.
+
+"Thank you. They are indeed lovely. But I must not detain you too long.
+I have come to you for that which I rarely seek--advice."
+
+"I am wholly at your service." Maclane installed her in a steamer-chair
+and placed himself on a bench beside her. "Some ethical question?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no! I am an Episcopalian," answered Evelyn, loftily. "Not but
+what I am very liberal," she hastened to add. "I subscribe to worthy
+charities of all denominations."
+
+There was charity without resentment on Maclane's good brow as he merely
+said: "Then in what way can I help you?"
+
+"My troubles are all of a practical nature."
+
+"In that respect, perhaps, I am not the best adviser."
+
+"But there's no one else in whom I can confide. People up here treat me
+in the strangest way. I never had such an experience."
+
+"Well, well, I'll do my best."
+
+"In the first place I don't know how to manage about money. Sergeant
+Scarlett has deposited several hundred dollars to my account in the
+Canadian Bank of Commerce, and as much more in the Bank of British North
+America, yet this morning, when I went to draw some, the managers of
+each informed me, apparently on their own responsibility, that I am put
+on a weekly allowance; that I may only draw so much, at stated times,
+and not a penny more. When I threatened to withdraw my patronage, they
+said that would be impossible till the account was closed. I went to
+three lawyers in succession to get out injunctions and things against
+them--but not a man would undertake the case. Oh, evidently all the
+officials are leagued in some sort of a ring or another, for when I
+went to the office of the _Perdu Claim_ and asked the editor to help me
+expose them, he only laughed. In New York, one or the other of the
+ten-cent magazines would have jumped at such an opportunity. However,
+that wouldn't matter so much if I could buy things from the stores on
+credit, but I find not a merchant will allow me to run up a bill. 'Cash
+down; spot cash for everything.' I never was so insulted in all my
+life."
+
+"I am sorry people have seemed inhospitable," began Maclane, "but----"
+
+"Oh, when it comes to that," Evelyn interrupted, "every one has been
+hospitality itself. Even the bank people, while officially they were
+insulting me, in the name of their wives and sisters offered to put up
+my party in some sort of fashion till we get settled. Hastie refuses to
+charge one penny for accommodating us till we find permanent quarters,
+though he had the impertinence--I'm sure he didn't mean to be
+impertinent--to suggest that we could stay indefinitely if we liked to
+work our way as chambermaids and waitresses and dishwashers and things.
+Even that impudent editor offered to turn out of the wretched cupboard
+of a room at the back of his office where he lives, and sleep on a
+printing press if we liked to go stay there. At least a dozen families
+have invited us to bunk in their stuffy little cabins till my father's
+return. But that isn't my way of doing things at all. I'm accustomed to
+having the best and paying for it. Yet not a soul will accept my note or
+give me one pennyworth of credit. Just wait till my father hears how I
+am being treated!"
+
+"Ah, your father!" Maclane caught at the idea. "A talk with your father
+would clear things up immediately."
+
+"Yes, of course. But where is my father? how to get at him? I ask, ask,
+ask. Everyone has seen him quite recently. Every one assures me he is in
+his usual perfect health. Yet when I insist on knowing definitely which
+path he took, every one points vaguely north, south, east, west, toward
+the mountains."
+
+"Then, for the present, why not accept that view of it?" the minister
+suggested. "It seems to be a matter of general knowledge that he is
+well, and off on a prospecting tour--and to a born prospector, such as
+is your father, there seem to be no limitations in the way of time,
+space, endurance, when searching for treasure. Only one thing can be
+predicated with certainty: sooner or later a man must turn up at some
+base of supplies to renew his outfit. And then, knowing your anxiety,
+the whole district will see to it that he and you are put into
+communication with each other."
+
+Miss Durant moved her daintily shod feet impatiently. "I'm not
+accustomed to waiting for anything that money can procure me. Why can't
+I send messengers flying to recall him, in every direction where there
+is a trail? One would think that hordes of these out-at-elbow camp
+hangers-on would be on their knees to me, begging for the chance--yet,
+though I have notices posted up everywhere offering a liberal salary and
+a thousand dollar bonus, I have had not one single application, not
+though I offer for security the Rainbow Mine."
+
+"Poor child!" Maclane looked at her compassionately, wondering in what
+way the bitter truth might be most gently broken to her, and examining
+his own honest conscience to know if his should be the task. Before this
+was clear to him, however, to his infinite relief he saw the handsome
+person of the Sergeant, now clad in full uniform, coming up the garden
+path. "Why not take our friend Scarlett into our counsels?" he hastened
+to suggest.
+
+"What! That insolent young man who pretended to take service with me!"
+Miss Durant ignored the soldier's military salute.
+
+"My dear," remonstrated the good Maclane, "our friend is greeting you."
+
+"Ah, Sergeant," cried Evelyn, with hauteur, "I did not see you! That is
+to say, in my world a lady does not see a gentleman until she recognizes
+him."
+
+"Faith, then, I'd best make myself invisible, lest when recognized I
+mayn't be seen." Scarlett turned to go.
+
+"Oh, please remain," pleaded Maclane, "and help me advise with Miss
+Durant. Pending her father's arrival, she finds herself, er--financially
+embarrassed--or rather at a loss to proportion her finances to her wants
+in the style to which she is accustomed. Now what do you suggest?"
+
+"The first word lies with you, Dominie." His back toward the two,
+Scarlett had seated himself on the veranda steps and was playing with
+Telegraph and Wrangel, who, after a series of critical sniffings, had
+taken him unreservedly into their favor.
+
+"Oh, not with me; not with any son of man," hastily disclaimed Maclane,
+who quite forgot that he had tried to throw the responsibility on
+Scarlett. "First always comes prayer. Take your troubles, my daughter,
+to the Divine Footstool."
+
+"Oh, of course," replied Evelyn, petulantly, "I always say my prayers,
+and make the responses in church. But just now I'm asking you how I am
+to pay for daily bread."
+
+"Well," Scarlett considered, "I should advise--to begin with--well----"
+
+"You've said well twice," Evelyn sharply pulled him up. "Best let well
+alone."
+
+"Pardon," retorted Scarlett. "Truth lies at the bottom of my well."
+
+In spite of herself Evelyn smiled, and perceiving his advantage he went
+on: "After all, well is the best beginning when you can't find a better.
+Why not for the present--just for a lark, you know--try roughing it?"
+
+"Roughing it!" echoed Evelyn, in dismay. "Wouldn't that be a bit rough?"
+
+"That's where the lark comes in," Scarlett assured her. "And we'd all
+make it as smooth as we know how."
+
+"A capital idea!" Maclane slapped his knee and looked toward the
+sweet-pea vines as if calling on them to agree with him.
+"So--er--original. Think what letters you can write to your friends at
+home, Miss Durant. And then that is the only way to get the
+full--er--bouquet of a country, so to speak; not from the tourist
+standpoint, but by living the life of the people of any class who, by
+their work, are making it."
+
+Miss Durant frowned, pondered a little, then smiled. "I rather like the
+notion. We came here largely to do good, and it will make the
+inhabitants feel more at ease; bridge over the social difference, as it
+were, if I adopt their mode of life. I really am very democratic."
+
+"Then that's where ye'll feel out of place," Scarlett remarked.
+"Wherever the surface is flat as a billiard table, as regards
+conditions, all class distinctions being wiped out, it's there that
+aristocracy begins. The democrats insist on it!"
+
+"Perhaps I can accommodate myself even to your idea of aristocracy,"
+Evelyn remarked, ironically. "The first question is, can we find a
+suitable dwelling?"
+
+"I've been investigating," answered Scarlett, "and I find at Lost Shoe
+Creek there is an abandoned cabin ye can have rent free; a really very
+decent affair 'twill be with a little patching, which the boys will be
+only too proud to lend a hand with."
+
+Evelyn gasped. "And you call that suitable for _me_!"
+
+Scarlett shrugged his shoulders. "This is the wilderness, my lady."
+
+"My dear," interposed Maclane, "you must remember that building is a
+costly matter. Even unskilled labor, when you can obtain it, commands
+five dollars a day. Talk of democracy; no man here is looking for a
+day's wage at carpentering, when any turn of the pick and shovel may
+make him a Croesus! Make up your mind to it that the Sergeant is
+offering you the equivalent of New York's most costly hostelry."
+
+"Oh, very well!" Miss Durant condescended to the cabin. "I suppose we
+can have tents for the servants? I shall need two women besides Sarah."
+
+"Pardon, miss." At her name, the maid's stout form appeared from behind
+the angle of the veranda, where she had been conducting a discreet
+flirtation with the waterman, who with a bucket supported by a frame on
+wheels and drawn by eight frisky little huskies, supplied Perdu with
+water from the lake at five cents the pail. "Do not count on me, miss.
+When my month is up I am looking to settle down on my own account."
+
+"You are going to desert me? You are planning to set up in business,
+Sarah?" asked Evelyn, dismayed.
+
+"Business!" Sarah laughed, scornfully. "With men growing on the bushes,
+as one might say."
+
+"You don't mean to say you are going to get married?"
+
+"Why not me as well as the next lady, miss, and sooner than some, in a
+place where ladies is valued far more for their practical abilities than
+for mere youth and skin-deep beauty. I am told that two French-Canadian
+gentlemen, who are starting rival laundries, came to blows about me in
+the Pioneer Bakery last night; this gentleman with the waterworks
+concession has just passed some extremely gratifying remarks about
+me--though my own preference is for a Scotch gentleman with religious
+views and a copper proposition. Dear knows one needs something stable to
+tie up to in this outlandish place, where day and night get all mixed
+up!"
+
+"But, Sarah," Evelyn laughed, "you know you haven't changed your watch
+hands since we left the Grand Central Station."
+
+"Time is time, miss," stated Sarah, "and twisting the hands of a watch
+don't affect it. I've always heard that mining camps was immoral places,
+and I'll answer for it this monkeying-with-the-clock business was
+invented by some scapegrace that wanted to deceive his poor wife about
+the hour he got home at night. But my choice, whichever I decide on,
+won't take me in that way!" She shook her umbrella with a mixture of
+coquetry and warning in the direction of the waterman.
+
+Again Evelyn laughed, rather helplessly. "And I have been so indulgent
+with you, allowing you to gratify your crude taste for colors, where any
+other mistress would have insisted on black, serge or alpaca, with at
+most for your bonnet a quill or wing. However, I mustn't stand in your
+light, Sarah."
+
+"You can't, miss," the maid informed her, respectfully, but with
+finality. "As for deserting you, as a married lady I shall only be too
+happy to chaperon you till your father gets back or till you settle down
+on your own account. And to start with, though my month isn't up, let me
+give you a bit of advice as from one lady to another. Policemen," she
+eyed Scarlett with disparagement, "are all very well in their way, but
+as from my own experience I know they are apt to be triflers,
+particularly on promotion. Measured by a New York figure of speech among
+us below-stairs ladies, miss, I myself wouldn't think of permitting an
+arm with fewer than three stripes on it round my waist."
+
+On this Scarlett assured Sarah, to her great indignation, that she, at
+any rate, would be safe from his advances, his arm not being long
+enough to meet her figure-of-speech's measurements. When she had
+returned to the waterman, Evelyn, recovering from the indignant
+embarrassment into which Sarah's advice had thrown her, sighed: "Such an
+admirable maid! However will my hair get dressed?"
+
+"Do it yourself," suggested Scarlett. "I always do mine." A girl in a
+red cloak just then happening to pass by he beckoned her. "I think after
+all I can find some one to do your work. Come here, Gelly. Miss Durant
+wants to talk with you."
+
+Evelyn surveyed the girl's unkempt, though now sober comeliness
+dubiously. "She doesn't look very---- However, is she willing, clean and
+honest?"
+
+"No, I ain't," snapped out Gelly, irritated by the inspection. "Not one
+of 'em. I'm as bad as they make 'em!"
+
+"Do you mean to tell me----" Evelyn's voice dropped to a shocked
+whisper. "Sergeant, have you dared recommend me a young person who is
+not--not virtuous?"
+
+"But she has so many other virtues," pleaded Scarlett for his protegee,
+"I thought ye might give her a chance." He appealed to Sarah, who had
+drawn near. "Perhaps ye'll let me explain to you as being the older
+woman."
+
+Sarah pursed her lips primly. "There's some things I'll never be old
+enough to hear."
+
+"I beg your pardon, heartily," Scarlett was heard quietly to say.
+
+"I am by no means sure that I shall grant it," replied Miss Durant, with
+a haughty toss of the head.
+
+"Oh, I was addressing Gelly here," he hastened to set her straight. "I
+had no right to let her be present at her own dissection."
+
+"Wait!" Evelyn had an inspiration. "I spend a week every Lent in a
+Settlement, and we came up here to do good, so why not----"
+
+"Now, look here!" Confronting her, arms akimbo, Gelly let loose the
+coarsely expressed, though not wholly unjustifiable, anger that in
+deference to Maclane and Scarlett she had been trying to restrain. "You
+better just dry up on that good-doin' proposition, else it ull be the
+worse fer yer round these diggin's! I know yer kind. I was in a Home
+oncet, and they came and sang to us, sometimes in fine duds ter show
+thet they regarded us like as their equals, which is lies! And sometimes
+dressed, oh my! so goody-goody plain, ter show thet rich folk don't
+reely care fer silk and sealskin--which is lies! And then they sent me
+to a convent, and the Sisters, they meant all right, but they cheated
+the doctor about the medicines they put in his prescriptions to save
+money fer the Church, and kidded to the saints about their souls. Souls!
+Shucks! Thar was a missioner oncet who thought she'd got a holt of me
+all right, all right. She were a-prospectin' ter launder my soul and
+show it tied up with baby-blue ribbons and sashayed with sanctity as a
+prize sample to the Lord. Want ter know what I done ter her? Not a
+thing, you betcherlife! Only smashed her face with a sody-water bottle!
+Soft drinks, cos thet kind puts most heft in the bottle and least ter
+the booze. See? Now you better get busy and earn your own salt, virtuous
+ef you're so plumb struck on virtue, and ef not, anyway----"
+
+A firm hand on her shoulder cut her short, as, wheeling her
+right-about-face, Scarlett sternly bade her, "Come!" And, like a little
+cowering dog about to be whipped for a victory in which, while half
+ashamed of it, it wholly glories, Gelly meekly followed him.
+
+The color which the girl's attack had driven from Evelyn's face came
+flooding back as she turned reproachfully upon Maclane: "And you never
+said a word to stop her!"
+
+"Ah," replied the minister, "I have learned that I always gain so much
+from listening to the other fellow's point of view."
+
+"But surely"--for Miss Durant was not a little proud of her capacity for
+"emanating gracious influences," as the dilettanti of her kind were apt
+to phrase it--"surely you believe in missionary work; in doing good?"
+
+Before replying, Maclane stooped forward and drew back a spray of vine
+that was spreading itself obtrusively over a little pink-faced daisy
+making a sturdy effort to look up to the god of light. "The best we can
+do is to try to give created things their chance. And in the end, my
+dear," he patted Evelyn's hand kindly, "it's the missionaries, the
+good-doers, to whom the good is done."
+
+"Gelly," Scarlett meanwhile was admonishing his stubborn charge, "in all
+this lowdown district there isn't a man so mean he could be hired to
+tell that poor girl yonder the truth about her father till we've made
+her feel at home among us and somehow fitted her to bear it. Now, Gelly,
+are you, a girl that has known trouble, going to be meaner than the
+men?"
+
+Gelly looked at him. "Better hev yer uniform let out fer the wings ter
+sprout," she advised him, with unfeigned homage, if with mocking
+tongue. "As fer thet thar stuck-up piece----" A rude grimace completed
+her estimate of Evelyn, but in the midst of it she paused suddenly, her
+ill-bred thumb dropping from her saucy nose. "I'm jiggered ef I don't
+b'lieve yer gone on her!"
+
+"That's neither here nor there," answered the young soldier. "I'll lock
+up your tongue in jail if it disturbs the peace, but I'd so much sooner
+put you on your honor, Gelly."
+
+"Till next time," promised Gelly, "yer kin let it go at that!" Then, as
+she went down the road, she burst into loud sobbing: "And I cud be
+decent ef some decent woman ud believe in me!"
+
+Maclane, who had been considering, had a new idea. "I wonder if Chilkat
+Jo couldn't be persuaded to help you, Miss Durant; that is, if you feel
+you must have service."
+
+"Of course I must," said Evelyn. "The orphans have been brought up to
+work, and make themselves useful, but they are my guests, my partners in
+this expedition; and naturally I cannot expect them to do things that I
+should not do myself."
+
+"Naturally," Maclane agreed with her, more readily than she deemed
+politeness required. Going to the door he opened it, and called to some
+one within. "O Joseph! Chilkat Jo!"
+
+The trader, who had been enjoying the hospitality of the mission, came
+forth with alacrity. Seeing Maclane, "Godam you! what do you want?" he
+asked, in tones at once amiable and fraught with high respect.
+
+"Oh, Joseph, what expressions!" The minister shook his head. "You see,"
+he explained to Evelyn, "like all the Indians, he learned bad habits
+from the white traders before the missionaries came his way. I sometimes
+wonder, if any Indians survive civilization, whether morally they will
+recover from contact with the whites. But, come, Joseph, our friends
+here are looking for a handy man to----"
+
+"Mally them, eh?" inquired the Indian, nimbly. After a quick glance at
+Evelyn he shook his head disparagingly. "Damn pletty gal, but not good
+business ploposition!" He then turned a considering attention upon
+Sarah, and nodded his head approvingly. "She all light. Fat squaw!
+Skukum squaw. Not lightfoot gadabout! Damfine cook, eh?" he inquired of
+the maid. "Squat by fire, fly venison, leady chiefs leturn flom hunting?
+Shake!" He held out a covenanting hand.
+
+"What, me become the bride of a heathen!" shrieked Sarah, horrified.
+
+"Me no heathen," indignantly protested Chilkat Jo. "Me swear, gamble,
+dlink like hell, plenty wives, laise Cain, all same as white man."
+
+"Joseph, my son, I will revise your code later," Maclane told him.
+"Meanwhile, this is not a marriage proposition. Are you willing to help
+Miss Durant here with her household chores--as a favor, you know," he
+hastened to add.
+
+"Not as a favor at all," broke in Evelyn, in a high, hard voice. "I wish
+to engage a man-servant, at good wages; one who knows his place and can
+take orders, and----"
+
+Her voice died before the Indian's fixed regard. "No squaw say to me,
+Mush! Get up, there! like dog. Mush! Lie down like dog. Me damn high
+muckamuck Skukum chief!" Wrapping more closely about him the blanket
+that, with a boiled shirt and store trousers, formed his costume, he
+re-entered the mission with the unsurpassable dignity of his race.
+
+Evelyn rose without a glance in the direction of Scarlett, who had
+rejoined them. "Come, Sarah. Thank you very much for all your good
+offices, Mr. Maclane. I anticipate the suggestion you and the Sergeant
+are obviously about to make: that I cook, wash, scrub, sew for myself."
+
+"Considering the conditions of camp life, my dear, it might be wise,"
+acquiesced the minister, as he shook hands.
+
+"Just for a lark, ye know," murmured Scarlett, pacifically, saluting.
+But though her pretty lip trembled, Evelyn held her head high and passed
+him without a sign.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+PEACE, PERFECT PEACE
+
+
+Feeling that on her father's return she could requite the obligation a
+thousandfold, Evelyn consented to remain with her party as guests of
+Perdu's Grand Hotel while the shack at Lost Shoe Creek was being made
+ready for their tenancy.
+
+Perdu, lying on a large lake of the same name, is port of entry, and
+base of supplies, to the goldfields beyond. Being at that time in the
+third year of its existence it had a highly developed social and
+commercial life. For in its initial season a camp is likely to be a
+bedlam of frenzied maniacs shrieking, Gold, gold, gold! The second
+season witnesses a slump proportioned to the inflated values of its
+predecessor. But if it weathers to a third, then some sort of poise is
+attained, as steady industries develop and existence seeks a normal
+plane. The fancy-women who flock wherever the nuggets are thickest, now
+segregate themselves in a secluded quarter of the township; married men
+send for their families, while the unblessed bachelor whistles "The Girl
+I Left Behind Me," or pays attention to the schoolteacher. On all sides
+one sees the effort, sometimes pitiful, always human and worthy, from
+the harsh matrix of the wilderness to wrest a home. And then follow the
+petty complexities of a miscalled civilization. To Evelyn's surprise,
+after the first warm tender of hospitality, she encountered the same
+restricted social conditions in Perdu that obtain in villages on the
+"outside," as the world beyond the mountains in northern latitudes is
+termed. Women left cards on her; heads of rival cliques warned her one
+against the other; the wife of the principal grocer planned a tea in her
+honor.
+
+On a brilliant summer morning, without cloud or shadow, mountains and
+valleys alike lying exposed to a broadside of sun that had been warming
+to its work since four hours after midnight, Evelyn set out to return
+the visit of the town surveyor's wife. A short cut through the clustered
+willow bushes brought her to the back door of their cabin, where she
+came upon the hostess at her washtubs, while from the doorstep the town
+surveyor was cleaning his teeth publicly. Wholly unembarrassed, the
+good people greeted their visitor with cordiality, and conducted her
+into the living-room, where babies, cot beds and cooking commingled with
+such observances of decency and taste as a woman of refinement, no
+matter how overworked, seems somehow generally able to contrive. In
+point of cultivation, so Evelyn soon discovered, her new acquaintances
+were fully her equal. Delighted as they professed themselves to be that
+her stay would be of long duration, yet to the plans she outlined for
+her projected improvement of the district they showed an almost marked
+indifference. When she dropped hints about the free library she intended
+to establish, Mr. Grayson began quite inappositely to brag of having
+made more money the previous winter by lumbering than in the way of his
+profession, owing to the fact that "up here, thank God! no one, man or
+woman, loses caste by honest labor of any sort." When she alluded to the
+art furniture she thought of importing for her domicile, Mrs. Grayson
+cautioned her to be very careful of her lamp chimneys, the commonest
+kind costing fifty cents at local stores, because, so the storekeepers
+said, of the exorbitant freight rates that prevailed. Also she advised
+Evelyn to start right in and do her own washing, as the local laundries
+charged something over four dollars for a dozen simple pieces. When Miss
+Durant mentioned the theatre she was arranging to have built, the opera
+troupe with which she already was negotiating for a series of
+performances to beguile the long Klondike winter, the Graysons merely
+said, almost with sarcasm, "How nice!" adding that the camp contrived to
+get up some fair entertainments of its own in the hall over the
+truckman's stable. Coming to the conclusion that they were jealous lest
+her advent should undermine the social prestige which, so Hastie had
+informed her, they enjoyed, Evelyn rose to take her leave and, kindly
+wishful to put them at their ease, admired the babies, the bearskin
+rugs, the horns of mountain sheep and goat upon the wall, the view, the
+two geraniums in pots upon the window-sill; accepted an invitation to a
+wild-strawberry picnic, offered to teach them bridge, and departed in a
+glow of self-gratulation at her tact in dealing with the envious and
+small-minded.
+
+On the hotel piazza she found the minister waiting for her, and with him
+Scarlett. To the latter she had not spoken since the day of their
+difference, for such she chose to consider it, in regard to Gelly. True,
+more than once she had caught sight of him galloping down the road or
+striding by on some official errand, but never had she lifted a finger
+to delay him, nor he appeared conscious of her presence.
+
+[Illustration: DEPARTED IN A GLOW OF SELF CONGRATULATION AT HER TACT.]
+
+Ignoring his greeting, in high good humor with herself and all the
+world, Evelyn opened fire. "Mr. Maclane, I wish you would tell that
+young man he owes me an apology."
+
+Scarlett suppressed a gratified smile. "Mr. Maclane, will ye convey to
+the speaker that she'll have to prove the debt for me to pay it?"
+
+"Tell him the last time we met he put me in the wrong," said Evelyn,
+prettily, the glow of her goodness toward the envious Graysons still
+upon her. "He behaved as though he thought me narrow, contemptible--and
+the worst is, the shoe pinches, because in a tiny degree I fear it may
+have been true."
+
+She waited with a charming air of penitence for contradiction, but, to
+her astonishment, none came.
+
+Instead, "I'm a brute, just," Scarlett remorsefully described himself.
+"Who am I to hold ye up the looking-glass? I'll never be so rude again."
+
+"Oh"--Miss Durant stiffened perceptibly--"I do not usually find the
+reflection unbearable to contemplate."
+
+"I've lived so long in the open, in primitive conditions," Scarlett,
+unmindful of her interruption, went on, "I always blurt out whatever
+pops into my mind. Well, there's precedent. In Eden, Adam must have
+called a spade a spade."
+
+"Ah, my young friend, but there's no record of his having called Eve a
+spade," observed Maclane, with a twinkle in his eye.
+
+"Faith, I'll drop the spade, then," laughed the Irishman, "if she'll let
+me call her Eve!"
+
+"Tell him," laughed Miss Durant, with heightened color, "that he goes
+too far."
+
+"Tell her I'd go farther--to any lengths, for her, so long as it didn't
+take me from her side."
+
+"Tell him he's kissed the blarney-stone."
+
+"Tell her I only practiced on it to keep my hand in till she should
+come."
+
+"How dare you!" cried Evelyn, feeling that she ought to be very angry.
+
+"Come, come, my children, peace," prescribed Maclane. "Miss Durant, I am
+here as a petitioner. One of my dear Indians, in fact the sister-in-law
+of Chilkat Jo, has a baby----"
+
+"Velly damfine Clistian baby!" interpolated the trader, who was sitting
+on the step near by, whittling out a toy canoe.
+
+"Oh, Joseph!" the minister protested, "when will you learn that a damn
+baby cannot be a Christian baby--nor a Christian baby a damn baby. We
+are to baptize the little one this morning," he told Evelyn. "And I am
+asked to beg you to stand godmother."
+
+"For a heathen unregenerate, miss!" Sarah put her head out of the window
+just behind the group. "Don't you mix yourself up with that truck!"
+
+"I'm a bit of a heathen nowadays myself." Maclane stopped Chilkat Jo's
+angry outburst. "My dear Indians have converted me."
+
+"I wonder you aren't afraid of being tried for heresy, sir," commented
+Sarah, "talking that loose way."
+
+"Perhaps I should be," agreed Maclane, "in the cities across yon
+mountains. But here they hold us in a charmed circle, and who can escape
+their spell?" He pointed to the lake, brilliantly ablaze, like a vessel
+holding wondrous depths of color, in which the snow-capped peaks with
+their V-shaped crevasses lay mirrored like cameos in turquoise relief.
+"My Indians--in my civilized days I used to preach hell-fire to them,
+till they scorned me for it, crying, 'Our children when they die become
+birds of song. Why, then, should we give them to you Christians to be
+burned?' Then, again, though I knew him to be a saint, dedicated in
+Christ's name to the service of his fellow-men, I used to avoid my
+brother, the Catholic priest, because his doctrines on the surface
+differed from my own! Again, my Indians taught me, scoffing, 'If
+Christianity makes enemies of her ministers, why, we want none of it.'
+Yes, all that I have given the heathen have they requited me a
+hundredfold, making me a Christian through the Christ I try to show to
+them!"
+
+"I will do what you ask me only too gladly, Mr. Maclane!" cried Evelyn,
+understanding that this was the good minister's way of making peace
+between herself and Chilkat Jo. "I shall be proud of my godchild; and I
+promise it the finest cup from Tiffany's----"
+
+"No, no! No presents, please," enjoined Maclane. "Only kindness,
+neighborliness, and an appreciation of the heathen virtues. The Sergeant
+here has consented to be godfather."
+
+"The Sergeant!" involuntarily exclaimed Evelyn.
+
+"Aye! In the short time he has been in charge, he has completely won the
+hearts of the tribe of Raven and Frog. No baptism complete without
+him."
+
+"Oh, as a sponsor, I'm painting the town red," admitted the Irishman.
+"And the Claim has a regular column of feeble-minded puns upon the
+epidemic. Well, I only hope the Scarlett creepers won't turn to Scarlett
+runners, in time of battle."
+
+"I will tell Lallah that you consent. Be ready, both, please, when you
+hear the chapel bell," directed the minister, going to the mission.
+
+Scarlett lingered, but as Evelyn took no notice of him, "Thankee for the
+pressing invitation," he remarked, drawing up a chair and seating
+himself beside her. "And are ye beginning to feel acclimated among us
+savages?"
+
+"Oh, you are doing your best!" Evelyn assured him. "Though I must say,
+even for the wilderness, the ideas of social distinction seem curiously
+lax. Why, as his head waiter is off on a spree, Mr. Hastie has offered
+me the place--three hundred dollars a month and tips!"
+
+"Good pay," commented Scarlett. "Why don't ye take it? I'd ask no better
+for my own sister, if I had one."
+
+Evelyn tossed her head. "To pass dishes to unwashed barbarians in
+corduroys who gobble off their knives and drink from their saucers.
+Even for your own sister," she could not forbear asking, "wouldn't you
+consider the situation rather primitive?"
+
+"I should, and that's the situation's saving grace," he promptly
+replied, "since primitive man is woman's best friend, once she makes him
+realize she will not let him be her enemy."
+
+Against her will, Evelyn looked at the speaker with reluctant
+admiration, forced to recognize that however ignorant of class
+distinctions the poor young man might be, his was certainly no ordinary
+mentality. Accordingly, woman-like, she harked back to personalities,
+hoping in shallow waters to take him, through his very superiority, at a
+disadvantage. "Oh, we have nothing to complain of on the score of
+friendliness," she laughed. "Our matrimonial opportunities seem limited
+only by the number of single men within proposing radius. No, Sergeant,
+I am not the belle. That proud position is disputed by Sarah and the
+plainest orphan, who also is the most muscular, because they frankly
+tell us, in a land where hired labor is not to be had a man must marry
+to get some one to cook and wash for him. However, such few score of
+proposals as have come my way, I honestly can brag, are for myself,
+since I am not considered a specially useful 'household proposition,'
+and oddly enough my great wealth seems not to impress these
+poverty-stricken millionaires in the least degree."
+
+"Oh, I tell ye, in a mining camp one gets down to first principles, or
+lack of them," commented the soldier. "It's chaos, till man and woman
+together evolve a paradise."
+
+Evelyn waited, hoping he also would propose to her in order that she
+might refuse him, not kindly, with the consideration she had shown the
+other poor victims who had laid their hearts at her feet, but with
+scathing denunciation of his insolence. Instead of improving his
+opportunity, however, the soldier rose. "Ye'll bid me to the wedding,
+Miss Durant?"
+
+"In what capacity--officially, or as a guest?"
+
+"Not as a mourner, that I swear."
+
+"I may decide to elope."
+
+"Impossible! In my bally those that want a marriage license have to come
+to me."
+
+"I've always had a leaning toward the nobility," remarked Evelyn, rather
+maliciously. "Are there no men of title in the camp?"
+
+"A handful or so of younger sons," Scarlett informed her, "and a
+pathetic lot in the main they are. 'Remittance Men,' we call them,
+because they are on allowance to stay away from home, avowedly that in a
+new country they may turn over a new leaf, but in reality that their
+families may be spared the shame of witnessing their final
+disintegration. Be good to such when ye come across them, Miss Durant,
+for the sake of what they ought to be, but don't marry them, for the
+whole lot of them together wouldn't make one decent man."
+
+Evelyn laughed, but her face crimsoned. "Dear, dear! And suppose, after
+all, you disapprove my choice?"
+
+"Faith, I'll exercise my official prerogative and take ye in charge
+myself! Meanwhile, I must turn my attention toward yonder suspect." He
+indicated a person with the deportment of a personage, who, dressed in
+the height of fashion, was strolling, tourist-wise, kodak in hand, down
+the village street.
+
+"Why, who can that be?" Evelyn leaned forward with interest.
+
+"That's my own question. He travels under the name of the Count St.
+Hilaire."
+
+"There's something very familiar about his appearance. I wonder if I
+mayn't have met him at Newport, or Washington. If so, bring him here
+that I may renew the acquaintance, Sergeant, please."
+
+"I'll search his title first." Scarlett ran down the veranda steps. "Now
+look out for trouble," he muttered to himself, seeing the stranger pause
+opposite a cottage in the Indian quarter, and level his camera at the
+totem-pole in front of it.
+
+A crowd of angry Indians who had been squatting on mats in the sunshine,
+making moccasins and weaving baskets, instantly rose and swarmed about
+him, vehemently protesting in Chinook against this insult to their
+sacred emblems, Chilkat Jo acting as interpreter.
+
+"Shame, shame, cursed shame to photoglaph the Laven and the Flog!" he
+cried, alluding to the totem's tribal device. "Velly godam Clistian
+shame!"
+
+"Hold on!" cried Scarlett, impartially, interposing his tall form
+between the evidently frightened foreigner and the avenging group.
+
+"Mais--ze Klondike barber-pole--I no steal him; je vous jure, gendarme!
+I make ze photographie!"
+
+"Yes, but unless you pay them for it to show your good will, the Indians
+think you are marking them for death," the Sergeant instructed him.
+"All right, honest Injun," he in turn assured the crowd. "Only
+sun-picture. Big man pay you big money."
+
+"Why," exclaimed Evelyn's astonished voice at Scarlett's elbow, "it is
+my courier, Alphonse--he has let his beard grow! That is the kodak he
+stole from me!"
+
+"Sacre papier, ze mademoiselle!" shrieked the man, recognizing her; and
+off he set as fast as his trembling limbs could carry him, Scarlett,
+reinforced by the children of the Raven and the Frog, in hot pursuit.
+
+"It's only what you might have expected, miss," remarked Sarah,
+consolingly, as in mortified silence Evelyn returned to the veranda.
+"The French is a deceitful nation. They always have to talk in a foreign
+language so you can't understand 'em."
+
+"It's all right!" Flushed and breathless, Scarlett came up. "He ran
+plump into Barney's arms. Here's your camera, Miss Durant. Later I'll
+get you to appear against the Count--just a formality, you know."
+
+"I shall do nothing of the sort!" declared Evelyn loftily. "Instead, you
+can fine me any amount you please for contempt of court. You doubtless
+will enjoy doing it! As for the kodak, you can give it back to Alphonse.
+I shall never touch it again!"
+
+"Miss, you are ungrateful," Sarah reproved her, "and the young man
+wounded in the fracas!"
+
+"Wounded!" cried Evelyn, in dismay.
+
+"Oh," disclaimed Scarlett, who was shaking his fingers as if to cast a
+pain from them, "it's nothing. Only in protecting the Count's beauty
+from an irate populace I gave my wrist a twist."
+
+"Oh, a sprained wrist is nothing to boast of," derided Miss Durant.
+
+"That's why I wasn't boasting of it." Scarlett turned to go.
+
+"Nevertheless"--Evelyn put a detaining hand lightly on his arm--"I took
+a course in First Aid to the Injured to fit myself for this life, and I
+know that a sprain ought to be treated with something, for fear
+something or other should set in. Sarah," she asked in a whisper, "what
+treatment does one give a sprain?"
+
+"Fermentation," prompted the maid, sagaciously.
+
+"That's it: fomentation! Please, Sarah, go fetch me--whatever one needs
+for fomentation."
+
+"Believe me, it is not necessary." Scarlett gave his hand another shake.
+"It soon will be all right."
+
+"Sit here!" Evelyn motioned him, peremptorily, to a chair beside her.
+"No, on this side. A soldier's first duty should be to obey."
+
+"Ah, well, my arms are ever at your service, even in times of peace."
+Scarlet leaned back, luxuriously, as she rolled up his sleeve.
+
+"Of course, you understand I should do this for anybody," observed
+Evelyn, sponging his wrist with the warm water Sarah had provided.
+
+"Of course, ye understand I should fight in defence of anybody's
+property," he matched her. "'Tis for that I draw my pay."
+
+"Is it tender?" inquired Evelyn, pillowing his hand upon her lap and
+dabbing it softly with a towel.
+
+"Tender's not half the word for it." The patient turned his face aside.
+"It's the limit of tenderness, and has to be treated on the homeopathic
+principle."
+
+"Miss, he makes light of it!" cried Sarah, who, under a harsh exterior,
+was, by nature, kind. "But his poor brow is simply wrung with anguish."
+She mopped the beads of perspiration that stifled mirth had brought upon
+the Sergeant's comely forehead.
+
+"Let us talk of other things to distract him," ordained Evelyn. "Come,
+Sergeant, tell us all about yourself. Begin at the very beginning."
+
+"Faith, like most babies," he complied, "I began by being the child of
+my parents."
+
+"Poor but honest folk, no doubt. Go on!"
+
+"They died before my remembrance of them. I infer the honesty and
+inherit the poverty. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who didn't
+want me. One time when I came home from school for the holidays my aunt
+just looked up from her novel and remarked, 'Oh, Jerry, how dirty you
+are!' So I ran away to make my fortune."
+
+"Which consists of something over a dollar a day and your keep."
+
+"And the prospect of a pension for my widow."
+
+"Your widow!" Evelyn dropped the hand she was engaged in bandaging. "I
+didn't know----"
+
+"Oh, I haven't got one yet," Scarlett hastened to assure her. "But I
+shall, please God, if I live long enough."
+
+"Sergeant, you are talking nonsense," said Evelyn. "Pain has made you
+flighty."
+
+"'Way up in the seventh heaven," assented Scarlett. "Don't be so cruel
+as to call me down."
+
+"There!" Having stuck a final pin in the handkerchief she had bound
+about the wrist, Evelyn folded the soldier's arm across his breast.
+"Sarah, go fetch me another sash, will you? I'm going to use this one
+for a sling."
+
+"Which color shall I get you, miss?" asked the maid, preparing to obey.
+
+Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with indifference. "I don't care--though I
+should think your own taste would lead you to see that blue goes best
+with this frock. There, Sergeant"--having made a creditable cradle of
+the ribbon for the soldier's arm and knotted it behind his neck, she
+came in front of him and surveyed her work admiringly--"that will do, I
+think. Now, remember, it must not be unbound for four and twenty hours.
+Promise! I wish you would stop laughing in that silly way and tell me if
+it feels all right, really."
+
+"Joyous, beyond words," Scarlett affirmed. "I only wish I were that chap
+in the mythology with a hundred hands--and every blessed one of them in
+need of fomentation."
+
+"I suppose you say these inane things to me because you think me
+incapable of appreciating sense," commented Miss Durant. "Just because
+all my poor little efforts to do good up here have seemed superfluous.
+Oh, yes"--she checked the protest that rose to his lips--"you all have
+been kindness personified, but I do not think you quite understand me,"
+she complained, with the injured quaver of one who at heart knows
+herself to be understood only too well. "I'm really not such an
+overbearing, ill-natured girl; only, I acknowledge, a wee bit spoiled.
+You see, after my mother died, when I was still a very small child, in
+Colorado, my father sent me to a fashionable school in San Francisco,
+and there I began to feel that in Colorado we had been quite savage.
+Then, in my early 'teens I was put at another still more fashionable
+school in Chicago, where I was made to feel that in San Francisco I had
+been hopelessly Western. Next, I moved on to an ultra-fashionable school
+in New York, where it was tacitly impressed on me that in Chicago we had
+been positively vulgar. After this came a course of Dresden, Vienna,
+London, Paris, by which I realized that in New York I had been
+provincial, crude. On my return I felt myself cosmopolitan, a finished
+product. Yet, in this short space up here you all have made me wonder
+if, after all, all the time, I have not been a bit of a snob. Yes, you
+can't contradict me. I know. A thoroughbred would have taken things as
+she found them--would be at home anywhere, while I----" Having amazed
+herself far more even than her hearer by this unexpected burst of
+confidence, Miss Durant amazed herself still more by an unexpected burst
+of tears.
+
+"Poor child!" Scarlett compassionated her, while liking her thoroughly
+for her candor. "Dear, dear little Evelyn, it's libelling yourself you
+are, although it's true, and that's the sweetest part of it. Here, take
+mine!" As she was hunting, between inconsolable sniffs, for the
+handkerchief with which she herself had bandaged him, he tendered her
+his own.
+
+"Oh, the sprain--your wrist!" cried Evelyn, in alarm.
+
+"That's all right," Scarlett reassured her, while drying her eyes with
+the hand he had removed for the purpose from the sling. "It was the
+other one that got the twist."
+
+Evelyn drew back. "You mean you dared let me bind up the wrong one?"
+
+"Ye made your own selection," Scarlett reminded her, in tones he vainly
+tried to render penitent.
+
+"That you did, miss," corroborated Sarah, coming from the hotel with the
+blue sash and tying it about Evelyn's slender waist.
+
+"Give me back my ribbon, my handkerchief!" demanded Evelyn of Scarlett,
+furiously.
+
+"Not for four and twenty hours," he answered. "Not even for you would I
+break a promise to a lady."
+
+"Never, never, never will I speak to you again!" cried Miss Durant.
+
+Just then the chapel bell began to ring merrily, and at the same moment
+Maclane hurried toward them from the mission, an open hymnal in hand.
+"Come, my children, we march in, singing," he explained, pointing toward
+the Indians, who were forming in a procession by the chapel door. "As I
+am short of hymnals, you and the Sergeant will have to share one, Miss
+Durant. Hymn 674. 'Peace, Perfect Peace.'"
+
+Evelyn stood still. "I absolutely decline to be associated in any way
+whatever with Sergeant Scarlett."
+
+"Oh, my children!" remonstrated the minister. "How can we talk of
+missionizing the heathen when the Gentiles so wrangle among themselves!
+Ready, please! Fall into line!" Striking up the tune, he led the way.
+
+And, somehow, in despite of her protest, Miss Durant found herself
+following, side by side with the hated young soldier, sharing the same
+hymnal, moreover, and joining her sweet voice with his manly one in
+praise of "Peace, Perfect Peace."
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+AT THE SIGN OF THE TEMPERANCE SALOON.
+
+
+"One sandwich, pie an' corfee, three-fifty! One ham an' eggs, pie,
+corfee, five! One whiskey on a doctor's prescription, two bits!" Thus
+Gumboot Annie scored off their reckonings to a party of prospectors who
+had patronized her lunch-tent, whereupon the prospectors meekly handed
+their pokes across the counter for her to weigh out the dust, according
+to her own liberal interpretation.
+
+"Halt!" Barney's rich brogue rang out upon the trail. "Twinty minutes
+for refrishmints by request, for man and baste!"
+
+"What's up now?" Gumboot Annie put her head out to reconnoitre. "Why,
+who's thet blamed cop runnin' in?"
+
+"Why, it's pop!" in dismay, cried Gelly, who was assisting the mother of
+Klondike Delmonicos in the capacity of bean-slinger. "My pop!" She began
+to cry.
+
+"Aye, it's Bully Nick, all right," corroborated a prospector, selecting
+a wooden toothpick with nicety. "They're fixin' ter extrydite him.
+Charge of murder. Oh, he'll be hanged this time fer sure!" he added,
+with relish.
+
+"Now, wouldn't thet jostle yer!" exclaimed Gumboot Annie, generally.
+"But didn't the stiff he peppered get well some?"
+
+"Yep, and they let off th' Bully on parole. But ef th' all-fired fool
+didn't celebrate his freedom by gittin' crazy drunk and shootin' at a
+United States Deputy Marshal fer targit! The marshal was a mean man an'
+deserved ter die--but Nick should 'a' left it to a meaner man to shoot
+him."
+
+"A United States Marshal!" exclaimed Gumboot Annie, scornfully. "Shucks!
+Drunk or sober, I thought Nick had more sense."
+
+"Nick shoots blind when"--her informant considerately lowered his
+voice--"when he's on the rampage for Dandy Raish. Nick has sworn ter
+kill Raish on sight along of Gelly."
+
+"Gumboot Annie! Gumboot Annie!" Bill's eager voice rang out on the clear
+air, as he came running toward the tent.
+
+"We're planning for to give Bully Nick a handsome send-off. Rustle,
+won't you? and get us up an A1, gilt-edged blow-out!"
+
+"Betcherboots I will," promised Gumboot Annie, cordially, adding that
+the Bully would be a great loss, socially, if hanged.
+
+"'Twas the drink done it--and I cud ha' kept him from it," moaned Gelly,
+rocking and wringing her hands.
+
+"Here, stop whining and make the sandwiches. Better git down behind the
+stove whar yer pop can't see yer!" Gumboot Annie gave the girl an
+ungentle but not unkindly push, and thrusting a carving-knife into her
+hand, bade her, as it might be the old man's last square feed upon this
+planet, not to spare the butter.
+
+"Gents, I thankee hearty for these here evidences of popularity," cried
+the Bully, as they placed him at the head of the well-filled board
+inside the lunch-tent. "Gents, go thou an' do likewise, but don't git
+pinched! Ah, well, ef I'd got my deserts I guess I'd'a' bin strung up
+twenty years ago."
+
+"Better late than nivver," politely remarked Barney, who, as an honored
+guest, by his gift of repartee was contributing greatly to the meal's
+hilarity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mush, get up, there! Godam you, Teleglaph and Langel. Mush!" Thus
+Chilkat Jo might have been heard profanely to encourage to increase of
+speed on a pious errand the parson's dogs that now were drawing a sled
+beside which the parson and the trader were running on their snow-shoes
+toward Gumboot Annie's tent. For all this took place many miles from
+Perdu and Lost Shoe Creek, on the heights where the snow still lingered
+in heavy, frozen masses, though the valleys below were abloom with
+summer flowers. "Him velly damn sick," he pityingly added, indicating
+the bundle wrapped in furs, strapped to the sled.
+
+"Very sick, indeed, I fear, my son; but not damn sick," the minister
+corrected. "Perhaps we can get succor here. Whoa, Telegraph, Wrangle,
+lads, whoa!" Halting opposite the tent, he read its legend with
+surprise, "TEMPERANCE SALOON. GUMBOOT ANNIE, PROPRIETOR."
+
+"Why, my daughter," he accosted the hostess, who, hearing sleigh-bells
+and scenting custom, had come forth, "does this indicate a happy change
+of heart and saving grace? You are taking thought to save your soul?"
+
+"Save my skin," retorted the Gumbooted one, spitting with an accurate
+estimate of distances. "That blamed Scarlett was making things hot for
+me, so I jest wheeled the hull outfit acrost the boundary!" She pointed
+to an old Russian landmark, protruding like a tiny headstone from the
+snow, and followed by a line of rude pickets, the records of a
+surveying party, that straggled, single file, downhill, dividing the
+United States from British North America. "Lasky's a prohibition
+proposition, y'know."
+
+"Whatever the motive, the action is most praiseworthy," Maclane
+commended her, "since your income must be greatly decreased by foregoing
+the sale of intoxicants."
+
+"Now wouldn't thet jar yer!" demanded Gumboot Annie, humorously, of the
+landscape. "I ain't up here fer me health," she then reminded the
+minister. "Fines or license, it's all one ter me. And prohibition, or
+wide open, you betcherlife the boys has jest the same old thirst."
+
+"H'm! Well, for the present I will waive the ethical aspect of the
+argument," replied Maclane, "and will beg you to sell me some stimulant
+for medicinal purposes. We have a lad here whom we found in trouble by
+the wayside; he is very low----"
+
+"What's it a case of?" Gumboot Annie leaned across the counter to
+inspect the bundle on the sled, from which Jo was now unharnessing the
+dogs. "Drink or scurvy?"
+
+"Neither," replied Maclane, raising the patient's head; "but, I fear,
+foul play."
+
+"Now don't that pa'alyze yer!"
+
+[Illustration: "WHY, MY DAUGHTER, DOES THIS DENOTE A HAPPY CHANGE OF
+HEART AND SAVING GRACE? YOU ARE TAKING THOUGHT TO SAVE YOUR SOUL?"]
+
+From a bottle she took from its hiding-place, Gumboot Annie poured out a
+generous dose. "Here, Ikey, take that ter the kid."
+
+"Whiskey, two bits!" cried Ikey, from sheer force of habit, as he
+obeyed.
+
+"Stop thet, yer little skin!" Leaning far over the counter, to the
+endangerment of her balance, his employer gave him a smart cuff. "I'm as
+close as they make 'em when I'm dealing with the healthy, but I've yet
+ter see myself take money from a dyin' man."
+
+"He told me to meet him here to-day," gasped Walter Pierce, as Maclane
+bent over him with skilful ministry.
+
+"Who, my son?"
+
+"Hush! Wait--it is a secret! I have a confession to make."
+
+When Gumboot Annie and her assistant had withdrawn, and the Indian had
+gone to a distance to feed the dogs, Walter tried to speak.
+
+"It was the drink!"
+
+"It generally is," commented the parson, mournfully.
+
+"I had an errand for another man--one of the greatest importance. He
+trusted me. Some men suspected his secret and dogged my footsteps,
+entered into conversation with me--pretended to take a fancy to me--to
+show themselves my friends--good fellows. They made me drink with them.
+Then I, in my turn, stood treat to keep my end up and show myself a good
+fellow."
+
+"Alas!" whispered the minister, as Walter paused for breath, "how many
+lads have I seen go down to the lowest depths, under that banner bearing
+the devil's own device: To show one's self a good fellow!"
+
+"Then, when they had got me where they wanted me, drunk," continued the
+sick man, "they robbed me. Oh, not of money--for though they made me
+play, they let me win--but of my honor----"
+
+"Oh, no, my son! It was you who threw away your own honor."
+
+"If only I had thought of that at the time! Now they have his
+secret--his samples. They'll know about his mine! Tell him----"
+
+The minister worked over the fainting form with tender skill. At last,
+when a glimmer of consciousness returned, "Now, my son," he said, "you
+owe it to the man you have wronged to make restitution. Tell me who he
+is, and what I am to say to him."
+
+Walter gathered his strength for a supreme effort. "Durant," at last he
+managed to gasp. "Tell his daughter----" He fell back in the stupor that
+precedes death.
+
+"O Joseph! Chilkat Jo!" called Maclane. And when the Indian, obeying
+with alacrity, replied, "Godam you, what you want?" he did not stay to
+reprove him, only bade him, "Run hot-foot to Lost Shoe Creek and fetch
+Miss Durant. Tell her I have a message from her father!"
+
+When the trader had set off, the speed of his winged-footed race
+redoubled by good will, Maclane, having drawn the sled to a spot where a
+clump of evergreens would act as wind-brake, went to the Customs Office
+on the crest of the hill in search of remedies.
+
+Seeing the coast clear, old Blenksoe, who for some time past had been
+hovering about the place, now came to the lunch counter, where he soon
+was joined by his arch-accomplice in villainy, Dandy Raish. "Hello, old
+tortoise!" was the hitter's salutation as his partner sauntered up.
+"I've been waiting for you this ever so long."
+
+"Thet you hevn't," contradicted Blenksoe. "Not that it matters--but you
+allus were a fust-class liar!"
+
+"Some folks have not enough imagination to lie," retorted the Dandy,
+paring his nails. "But chuck all that and get to business!"
+
+"Business! Hully gee! Anythin' doin'? Am I in it?"
+
+"Sure--if you can deliver the goods! Order the drinks, won't you?"
+
+"Say, you got a tocter's brescription for liquor?" queried Ikey, when
+old Blenksoe did as he was bidden.
+
+"I'll sure hev an undertaker's stiff-ticket ef I don't get it," replied
+Blenksoe, as he carried the medicinal doses over to the bench where the
+Dandy had ensconced himself.
+
+"Best stay out here where no one can hear us," explained the latter.
+
+"That suits me all right," agreed Blenksoe, lighting a pipe and settling
+himself on the Canadian side. "Thar's a warrant out fer my arrest in
+'Lasky."
+
+"I thought you were _persona non grata_ in the Dominion also, since that
+hold-up of the stage near Lost Shoe Creek."
+
+"Thet hold-up you put me up to, while you sneaked in the bushes. You'd
+orter be pinched yerself fer takin' a rake-off. Ain't the receiver as
+bad as the thief?"
+
+"Piano, pianissimo," advised Raish. "One never knows who's within
+earshot." He glanced about him fearfully.
+
+"Thet's so," admitted Blenksoe. "I declar, what between Kennedy on the
+one hand and Uncle Sam on t'other, and both a-gittin' so all-fired
+pertikeler, every day makes it harder for a crook ter make an honest
+livin'." He lighted an ill-smelling pipe. "Well, Dandy, fire away."
+
+"Have you seen Durant lately?"
+
+"Durant? Who th' hell's Durant?"
+
+"Your partner, Lucky. Durant is his outside name."
+
+"You don't say! Oh, Lucky, he ain't no good no more. Lucky's off his
+nut. Went stark, ravin' mad the day his gal came inter camp. I've shuk
+Lucky."
+
+"More fool you. He's found a mine!"
+
+"I dessay. As usual, a pocket, or a pot of gold eagles at th' fut of a
+rainbow."
+
+"Not a bit of it. A bona-fide mine. What d'you make of these samples?"
+
+Through his prospector's glass, Blenksoe examined the small clods of
+earth Raish held out to him, then uttered the profanest expletive at his
+command.
+
+"Free gold, assayin' sixty ter th' ton!"
+
+"You'd better believe it is!" The Dandy pocketed the samples which
+Blenksoe was eyeing hungrily.
+
+"Say, I'd like a sample ter test. Oh, well, as you say! How'd you come
+by 'em?"
+
+"I got them with the information from a kid whom Lucky has taken in on
+the ground floor."
+
+"You mean ter tell me the stiff hes shuk me, his pard an' dearest
+friend?" Blenksoe seized his gun. "I'll fix Lucky!"
+
+"Keep quiet, you old fool! Durant don't owe you a bean, and you know it.
+And the way you've always grafted on him he is not likely to run after
+you to put you wise."
+
+"Thet's so. Whar is the mine?"
+
+"Ah, that's just where my information stops short. If I knew I shouldn't
+need you."
+
+"Well, I s'pose the game is ter lay low, rubber round till we locate the
+claim, and jump it."
+
+"And have that blasted Scarlett butting in? Guess again! Claim-jumping
+don't go, now the M. P. are in charge. We have to do something far
+cleverer. I'll tell you what. I've thought it all out. We have to kidnap
+Durant, and kidnap his daughter."
+
+"Why the hell----"
+
+"Blenksoe, a cow could give you cards and spades. We'll play them off,
+one against the other, till he signs over a half interest in his mine
+for ransom."
+
+"Dandy, you're a wonder!" Blenksoe regarded the brains of the concern
+with admiration. "I'll get the gang on to it to oncet. It ull be no
+trick at all ter kidnap Lucky. Lucky's dead easy! But the gal--gals is
+scarce, and conspickerous accordin', in a mining camp. How the hell
+are we to handle the gal?"
+
+"Leave her to me. I have already struck up a traveling acquaintance with
+her; managed to do her some little service en route. That's why I was
+careful to keep in the background during the hold-up. I sent her a
+private message to meet me here to-day, telling her I had a confidential
+message from her father. We must act like a flash, for that blasted
+Scarlett is sweet on her. By Jove! that's an idea!" The Dandy slapped
+his knee. "I owe him a bad turn. I'll cut him out! I'll marry her
+myself!"
+
+"You, you son of a camp cook!" sneered Blenksoe.
+
+Raish shrugged his shapely shoulders. "The camp cooks of to-day are the
+swells of to-morrow. I'm ambitious. I've always qualified myself for the
+toniest society. I spend as much for perfumery as for liquor, and I
+never sleep between sheets but I wear pink silk pyjamas."
+
+"By gum, I b'lieve you'll git thar!" cried Blenksoe, overcome by these
+evidences of culture. Going to the counter, before Raish could stop him,
+he ordered: "Set up th' drinks, Ikey! Here's ter Dandy an' his bride!"
+
+"Haow's that? Raish a-goin' ter git married?" inquired Gumboot Annie,
+who was bustling about for more provender for the banqueters inside the
+tent. "And who's the lady?"
+
+"Oh, jest a little silk-stockin' proposition from the States," replied
+old Blenksoe, unmindful of the Dandy's warning signs. "One of the Noo
+York smarties, and jes' fitted fer Raish."
+
+"Eh?" shrieked Gelly, starting up from her corner behind the stove. "She
+is, is she! And what about me?"
+
+"Gelly! Tagging on as usual!" exclaimed Raish, in disgust.
+
+"Thar, thar, Gelly! I was only joshin'," Blenksoe tried to soothe the
+girl.
+
+"Dandy, you're a wonder!" Blenksoe re-[1] him, pleading. "Pop is run in,
+and mebbe goin' ter be hanged. Raish, make an honest woman of me that I
+may go bid him good-by!"
+
+1. Transcriber's note: One or more lines are missing from the original
+    text.
+
+The Dandy drew back. "What! Me, with my prospects, take up with the
+daughter of a murderer!"
+
+"You, you----" Gelly flew at him with the carving-knife she held.
+
+"Here, quit that!" Gumboot Annie adroitly snatched away the weapon. "My
+sandwich-knife! Now wouldn't thet stick yer?" in aggrieved tones she
+appealed to an imaginary audience on the horizon line. Bystanders
+joined in the discussion, and, attracted by the noise, some of the
+diners came running from the tent, the Japanese paper napkins, that the
+high character of the occasion had warranted, in hand, ready for a scrap
+or any other fun that might be going; accordingly, the Dandy saw the
+wisdom of adopting a conciliating policy. "Gelly"--he led the girl
+aside--"I do mean to do the square thing by you, but no man likes to be
+coerced, you know; and after what has gone between us I don't want to be
+laughed at publicly for a fool--and if you love me, you don't want to
+render me publicly ridiculous. Just go back, quietly, like a good girl
+and wait for me at Lost Shoe Creek. When I have one or two tangles
+straightened out I'll come back and marry you, honest! But remember, on
+the quiet, If you blab--well, I'll see you somewhere before I ever speak
+to you again. Now, good-by and go!"
+
+And for the last time, though not the first, poor Gelly trusted him.
+
+Looking after the red-cloaked and hooded figure, as on snow-shoes she
+sped lightly down the trail, the Dandy laughed. "Women are easy, dead
+easy!" he exclaimed; and then he laughed still louder, as winding in
+and out through mountain passes the sound of approaching sleigh-bells
+and girls' merry voices floated through the crystal air. "Dead, dead
+easy," he reiterated, with the unction of enjoyment in his sapient
+superiority. "Here comes Evelyn now!"
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+THE PROVISIONAL BOUNDARY.
+
+
+"Miss Durant! This is a delightfull surprise!" Dismounting from her sled
+drawn by eight frisky little huskies, Miss Durant encountered not the
+Mr. Horatio Travers who had written, begging for a private interview
+near Gumboot Annie's, on a confidential mission from her father, but the
+handsome and genial presence of Sergeant Scarlett.
+
+"The surprise at least is not all on one side," laughed Evelyn, giving
+him her hand. "What are you doing so far from headquarters?"
+
+"My jurisdiction extends to the boundary line. Just now it is my painful
+duty to meet a United States Representative in yonder Customs building,
+and formally make over to him the person of Bully Nick."
+
+"Ah, the poor Bully!" Evelyn sighed. "He has this incorrigible habit of
+shooting the wrong people. But I'm in hopes of getting him off. I shall
+spare no expense. I've wired to Sitka, in my father's name, for the
+ablest counsel to defend him."
+
+"And, confidence for confidence," said Scarlett, "what are you doing
+here?"
+
+"Oh, just keeping an appointment--I mean, mushing it with Sarah and the
+girls for a day's outing," Evelyn hurriedly corrected herself, recalling
+that Travers' note enjoined the strictest secrecy. "And, pardon me, I
+must go to their rescue now." To conceal a slight embarrassment caused
+by her prevarication, she sped toward her party on whom the Customs'
+officials of two nations had pounced down, assuming that they intended
+to cross the boundary and must be treated like malefactors accordingly.
+
+Picking up the muff that Evelyn in her haste had dropped, Scarlett
+buried his face in the soft fur. "I'm another," he confided to it.
+
+"'Tis himself!" Barney hurried toward him from the tent, but as
+Scarlett, in his abstraction, did not notice him, he inquired, with
+solicitude: "Are ye here, sorr?"
+
+"Faith, no, man. I'm wandering."
+
+"Is ut impty ye do be feeling yourself inside, sorr?"
+
+"Empty is it, with the appetite that's there! Bring me rations out here.
+Bring a double share." His eye strayed toward Evelyn.
+
+"H'm! 'Tis a case of wan plate and two spoons, or I'm a blind man!"
+commented Barney, hastening to obey.
+
+"Miss," cried Sarah, in shocked accents, as Evelyn drew near, "them
+orphans are flirting outrageously with the Customs gentlemen of both
+nations, and feeding them with fudge."
+
+"Dear, dear," mocked Evelyn, "we must put a stop to that at all costs,
+Sarah. Take the girls into the tent and give them their dinner--or there
+will be international complications."
+
+"Internal ones, more likely," put in Scarlett, who had followed her.
+"Sweet things don't often come our way. And speaking of sweet things,
+Miss Durant, won't you yourself mess with me out here in the open? Just
+for the experience, ye know. It isn't really cold. The snow is left over
+from the winter, but it's a summer sun overhead."
+
+"It does look tempting," confessed Evelyn, as Barney appeared, bringing
+with him provender, with its equipments, for two, deftly arranging it on
+a table by the bench. "I'm early for my appointment--I mean, I have
+plenty of time, and Sarah can chaperon the girls."
+
+"Have ye room enough?" with solicitude inquired the soldier, placing
+himself beside her.
+
+"Plenty, thanks. Have you?"
+
+"Too much," he protested, "on the wrong side." The bench having no back,
+he gallantly supplied the lack. "Allow me to make ye an arm-chair."
+
+Evelyn properly edged away. "Sergeant, are these your company manners?"
+
+"Surely, since two's company."
+
+"Come, come, I can't permit you so much latitude!"
+
+"If you knew your map ye'd know that the further north ye go the closer
+the lines of latitude are drawn."
+
+"Speaking of maps, I wish you'd tell me exactly where we are?"
+
+"Faith, where I am is exactly what I'm trying to find out--how far I've
+gone with you."
+
+"Do be sensible, if you can, and tell me where we are sitting,
+geographically speaking."
+
+"Geographically speaking, we are sitting on the provisional boundary
+between our respective nations."
+
+"Oh! Please don't add it is called provisional because one stops here
+for provisions."
+
+"At any rate, provisions don't stop here long. Here, I've saved ye the
+last bean."
+
+"Thanks. I take my bean wherever I find it."
+
+"Good! Now will ye poach on my preserves?"
+
+"With pleasure!" Evelyn held out her tin plate. "I love peaches."
+
+"Ah, I'm more exclusive. I only love a peach!"
+
+"One at a time, no doubt, you mean. And for the sake of your taste, I
+hope, fresh ones, not canned. By the way, you, I believe, would write
+them tinned?"
+
+"But we both pronounce them excellent." Scarlett divided with her the
+last spoonful of the fruit.
+
+"A century ago you taxed my tea." Leaning over, Evelyn took the extra
+lump of sugar from the young man's saucer. "So now, to even things, I
+steal your sugar."
+
+"Quite right," he acquiesced, "since revenge is sweet."
+
+"How silly this climate makes one, though I wish all international
+differences could be so bloodlessly adjusted," remarked Evelyn.
+"Suppose, instead of war, we had spelling matches! That, indeed, would
+bring peace with honor."
+
+"Sure and there'd be fighting over peace," the soldier told her, "since
+you would spell it H-O-N-O-R, while I should insert a U."
+
+"Naturally," replied Evelyn. "Your nation's honor always will include
+U."
+
+"A pretty compliment," conceded Scarlett, "but I feel as if I had been
+spelling for it." As they had finished he put aside the dinner-tray. "I
+wonder if I shall ever persuade you to cross the line in earnest?"
+
+"And pray, why should I do the crossing? Why should not you be the one
+to come over to the enemy?"
+
+"Ah, I'm a soldier! And I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I
+not HONOUR more!"
+
+"All very fine, sir, but, like England, somehow you have advanced
+imperceptibly across the boundary."
+
+"Oh, no!" Scarlett moved closer to her. "Like England, when I make
+advances I push the line ahead of me."
+
+"Remember the old commination," Evelyn exhorted him, "'Cursed be he that
+moveth his neighbor's landmark.'"
+
+"That was ancient law," Scarlett reminded her. "The modern dispensation
+bids thee love thy neighbor as thyself. And up here, where both nations
+work side by side, common hardship makes us truly neighbors, next of
+kin. Look yonder!" He pointed to the summit of the watershed, the
+ridge-pole of the mountain range, where, sheltered under one roof, were
+the Customs offices of two nations, while from lofty flag-poles floated,
+side by side, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. "The snow, as it
+melts, parts into two rivers, one running down into the Dominion, the
+other into the States, each bearing greetings from the sister flags.
+And, listen! In the tent, to the same tune the two national anthems are
+being sung----" Rising, he bared his head, Evelyn standing beside him,
+while in perfect attune the banqueters sang, according to their
+allegiance: "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," or "God Save the King."
+
+"After all," commented Scarlett, "peace is spelled without a difference,
+both sides of the boundary; and, lip to lip, our views will be identical
+on the way of spelling love."
+
+"And how may that be?" inquired Evelyn, gathering up her furs and moving
+away. "In love-letters?" As Scarlett caught up with her she quickened
+her pace, remarking, "I must go now. Really, Sergeant, you ought some
+day to give us a lecture on these theories of yours, for I have always
+wondered how an Irishman makes love."
+
+"Like a lover, sure," promptly retorted Scarlett, catching her in his
+arms and stooping his head to hers.
+
+To her surprise, Evelyn found herself more than half consenting to his
+kiss even while trying to rebuke it. Before, however, she had found
+breath to protest, Scarlett released her hurriedly in silence, for at
+the moment Nick, with his custodian, and followed by his faithful
+henchmen, came from the tent, escorting Sarah and the orphans in an aura
+of national and personal good will, while a messenger came to inform the
+Sergeant that the United States representative, to whom the prisoner's
+person was to be delivered, had arrived.
+
+Evelyn, for her part, overcome with an embarrassment mingled with
+another feeling that was wholly new to her, ran in the opposite
+direction down the trail, and over a patch of frozen snow to a secluded
+spot sheltered by a thicket of scrub firs, where, even as she broke from
+her lover's embrace, she had seen her former traveling acquaintance and
+present correspondent, Horatio Travers, awaiting her.
+
+Scarlett went up immediately to the Customs building, there to transact
+the formalities incident to the extradition of Bully Nick. These
+concluded, and the official courtesies having been duly proffered and
+accepted, he at last felt free to continue his interrupted wooing.
+Coming out into the open, he was going to seek Evelyn in a merry group
+where the orphans were being taught the art of keeping erect on
+snow-shoes, when he was accosted by Maclane.
+
+"Oh, Sergeant! I am called upon to marry a couple under circumstances of
+a peculiar nature, involving exceptional haste. There is no Gold
+Commissioner, I find, nor Justice of the Peace, in the district, nor
+within a day's journey, from whom to obtain a license; but I have
+consented to accept a copy of the Dominion Marriage Act, or rather a
+specified clause thereof, signed by yourself as Mounted Policeman in
+charge. Will that arrangement satisfy you, judicially speaking?"
+
+"Surely," replied Scarlett, "any marriage that you can, with conscience,
+solemnize I can sanction without a conscience, sir."
+
+"I never was called upon to perform a duty that I liked so ill," the
+minister acknowledged, as he followed the soldier to the Customs
+building. "In fact, I have exceeded my prerogative, through my personal
+interest in one of the contracting parties, in counseling, beseeching,
+delay. Yet what can I do? The young lady is of age; she is determined on
+the step; moreover, she has her father's consent, while I have not one
+single argument to urge against it, merely a feeling of dislike,
+distrust, for the gentleman of her choice."
+
+"In primitive regions I have found it unwise to oppose too many
+obstacles to marriages," remarked the soldier, who, by this time, was
+busily copying the required clause from a sheepskin-covered tome, "since
+there is always a popular tendency to forego the ceremony, if it
+involves the slightest trouble. Oh, I'm used to this! Also, I have had
+not a few applications for divorces."
+
+"Eh?" exclaimed the minister. "Surely you do not grant them, my young
+friend?"
+
+"I have no power to," Scarlett told him. "The best I can do under such
+circumstances is to give the applicants a bill of Dissolution of
+Partnership, to minimize the squabbling over the division of the outfit.
+These present proteges of yours may be my next candidates. There." He
+handed Maclane the paper. "Now it is ready for the signatures--yours and
+mine. But, first, these blanks must be filled in with the names of bride
+and groom."
+
+"They shall write them for themselves," replied the minister, who was
+visibly agitated. "Not by a pen stroke will I further them beyond what
+is forced upon me." Going to the door he beckoned two persons waiting
+without, and to Scarlett's amazement summoned by name, "Horatio Travers!
+Evelyn Durant!"
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+LUCKY'S LUCK.
+
+
+Cheerful, erect, recreated in body and spirit, Durant came to Gumboot
+Annie's hostelry, where he had made an appointment to meet Walter
+Pierce. Not seeing the young man, and having his own reasons for not
+letting it be known that there was anything of a business nature between
+them, he refrained from making inquiries; ordered a cup of coffee, and,
+lighting a pipe, seated himself in a sheltered nook outside the tent to
+wait.
+
+He had not been there long when the altercation between Dandy Raish and
+Gelly interrupted the banquet then in progress, bringing the diners from
+the tent, Nick, closely guarded by Barney, in the van.
+
+Gelly, acting on Raish's instructions, had gone speeding down the trail,
+but the Dandy still lingered, to keep his secret tryst with Evelyn.
+
+Catching sight of him, the Bully, handcuffed as he was, made a furious
+lunge at him. "Thet thar's the snake I've swore ter kill!" he shouted.
+"Let me free!"
+
+"No, sorr!" Barney restrained him. "No cheatin' av the extry-edition, if
+ye please."
+
+Every one began to talk at once, his followers urging the Bully to
+vengeance or forgiveness, according to their natural dispositions, at
+present heightened by conviviality, while Raish, fearing lest the former
+policy should prevail, held up a hand for truce. "It's all right, Nick.
+You don't understand. Stand back, you fellows, can't you, and give me a
+word alone with Nick."
+
+"Aye!" acquiesced the Bully. "I don't need help to curse ye, Raish. When
+I'm through with him, lads, I'll leave him to you ter skin him fer the
+skunk he is, d'ye see?"
+
+"Can't you leave us?" inquired Raish of Barney, who still stood his
+ground by Nick.
+
+"No, sorr, I cannot."
+
+"But it's a private matter."
+
+"Bedad, thin, that takes me in all right, since I'm a private meself
+till promoted."
+
+"Oh, very well! Only I didn't like to drag in a woman's name before a
+third person," explained the Dandy. "What I want to say, Nick, is this:
+I'm awfully sorry for all the trouble I've brought on you. It's not
+entirely my fault, the way women do pursue a fellow. But never mind all
+that," he hastened to add as the Bully began to growl ominously. "I want
+you to know that I intend to do the square thing. I'm going to marry
+Gelly."
+
+"Eh?" cried Nick, unable to believe his ears. "You'll right my gal!
+Honest, Raish?"
+
+"On my honor as a gentleman--that is, if she'll have me. Now, don't get
+angry, Nick, till I explain. Something has turned her against me of
+late. Suppose you write her a little note, advising her to do it."
+
+"Advisin' her! I'll skin her if she kicks!" threatened Nick. "Here,
+boy," he turned to Barney, "get me quit of these bracelets while I write
+ter my darter."
+
+"No, sorr, I wull not!"
+
+"I tell ye it's my last words--good-by--to my darter."
+
+"First or last, sure ye can dictate your autography."
+
+"Oh, hang!" ejaculated the Bully.
+
+"Sure, thin, that's for what I'm saving ye!"
+
+"Thar ain't no word profane enough ter describe ye, d'ye see?" Nick told
+his keeper. "Here, boys, which one of ye kin write?" he called over to
+his followers.
+
+"Don't make her name common with that gang," cautioned the Dandy, whose
+alert mind was actively evolving a new piece of villainy as the
+situation developed. "Ask an older man; a gentleman."
+
+"You've never done a thing ter her name, hev yer?" inquired the Bully,
+wrathfully, yet not wholly rejecting the advice. "Here, Sandy, man, come
+write a message for me. You've had schoolin'."
+
+"Ou, aye!" assented the Scotchman, "ower muckle schoolin'. Mon, mon,
+when I reflect on a' this sma' head contains! I'll e'en gie ye a
+selection fra' Marmion--or a wee bit o' Rabbit Burruns." Being, however,
+far gone in conviviality, he maundered off into protestations of undying
+affection for his leader, assuring him he'd e'en gie his proper
+copposeetion to see him hangit decently.
+
+Disgusted, Nick shoved Sandy aside, and in so doing caught a glimpse of
+Durant in his corner, smoking peaceably. "Thar's old man Lucky!" he
+exclaimed, even as Raish had foreseen. "Might ask him ter help us out.
+Hi, Lucky! Want ter do me a good turn?"
+
+"Willingly." Rising, Durant joined him. "What is it, Nick?"
+
+"Waal, the government thinks so much of me these days I hev to employ a
+secretary fer me correspondence, d'ye see? Say, will you write down a
+message fer me to my gal?"
+
+"With all the pleasure in the world," assented Durant, heartily.
+
+"Babper an' envelobe, two bits. Ben an' ink, two bits. Plotter, two
+bits, bostache-shtamp, two bits!" At Nick's order, Ikey set writing
+materials before them on the counter.
+
+"Say, Nick," Raish prompted, in an undertone, while Durant was removing
+his snow-spectacles and chafing his stiff fingers, "best not enter into
+details. Best let bygones be bygones. Best just say you want your
+daughter to let me bring her as my wife to pay you a visit during your
+enforced captivity--perhaps to say good-by."
+
+"You let me choose my own words, and be damned to yer."
+
+"Oh, very well! Only I don't see why you should be in a hurry to shame
+me and Gelly before an outsider."
+
+"My gal has shamed herself, and thar ain't no shamin' you!" Nick,
+however, acted on the advice. "Ready, Lucky? Say, I don't know how to
+start it. I kin jaw her fluent ter her face, but I never wrote her
+afore." He hesitated, embarrassed.
+
+Smiling reassuringly, Durant pointed to the words he already had
+mechanically set down. "My dear daughter--that's how I begin to my own
+girl."
+
+"Darter don't look as if it was spelled right," criticized the Bully.
+"But you know best, Lucky. Fire away! Make it affectionate, but firm,
+d'ye see? Tell her I'll cuss her in this life and skin her in the next
+ef she don't let Raish bring her ter me as his wife ter say good-by. No
+trimmin's, mind! Blow the signiture! She'll know fast enough it comes
+from me."
+
+"Your loving dad," Durant concluded. "That's how I end off when I'm
+writing to Evelyn."
+
+"Pop ud 'a' sounded more nateral," remarked the Bully. "But mebbe dad is
+dockimentary. So let her go."
+
+"Add a postscript," in a hurried whisper Raish enjoined Durant. "Tell
+her this is just a matter of form, and that I promise on my honor not to
+hold her to the arrangement permanently, if it is distasteful to her.
+Tell her----"
+
+Durant looked up, surprised. "Surely all that lies wholly between you
+and the young woman."
+
+"True," admitted Raish, "but as I don't mind confiding in you that the
+young woman is tired of me, I want her to feel secure that in satisfying
+her father's scruples I don't intend to take an unfair advantage of
+her. Suppose I set that down myself." He did so, writing rapidly, but
+clearly. "Now, Mr. Durant," he handed the other the pen, "you will add
+to your kindness to me more than you dream by placing your signature as
+witness to my pledge."
+
+Durant did as he was asked, feeling that, little as he understood the
+matter, he was probably serving the best interests of the unfortunate
+Gelly.
+
+"As witness only," he, however, stated. "It is an arrangement in which I
+take no moral responsibility."
+
+"Thanks. I understand your scruples and respect them. The responsibility
+is mine entirely. Just at present I cannot explain, but later the whole
+position will be made clear."
+
+"What's all them goin's-on?" suddenly demanded Nick, whose attention had
+been momentarily distracted by an argument between Mops and Sandy on the
+poetic merits of Rabbit Burruns. "No monkeyin' with dockiments over
+thar."
+
+"I'm only directing it," explained the Dandy, who had folded the letter
+and inclosed it in an envelope.
+
+Nick looked over his shoulder, breathing heavily with interest. "By
+gum," he ejaculated, wrathfully, "ef ye hevn't blotted my gal's name,
+Raish, and not fer the fust time!"
+
+[Illustration: "DARTER DON'T LOOK AS IF IT WAS SPELLED RIGHT,"
+CRITICIZED BULLY.]
+
+"Oh, I'll make that all right!" The Dandy put the letter in his breast
+and walked away.
+
+"Ef yer don't may yer sizzle!" Nick called after him. Turning to Durant:
+"Pard, I'm grateful," he declared, with feeling. "Pard, the best wish I
+kin give ye is, may ye never need no one ter do the same by you."
+
+"Thanks, Nick. That's all right." Durant looked about him, and seeing
+that Raish was out of earshot and Blenksoe not in sight, went closer to
+the Bully and his followers. "Friends, there's something I want to say
+to you," he began. "It's just this: You've all done me a kindness to my
+dying day I shan't forget. A fortnight ago, when my girl came into camp
+expecting to find me living in a diamond-encrusted palace, and I stood
+there so forlorn she didn't recognize me, a broken-hearted beggar, you
+who by one word might have pricked the bubble and humiliated me before
+her and her before the world, by your silence protected her and me. It
+was the noblest thing----" His voice broke; he wiped his eyes.
+
+"Thet's all right, Lucky! Brace up, old man!" came from one and another
+of the group.
+
+"Aye, but now I want you all to hear my good news!" cried Durant,
+detaining them as they were preparing to go back into the dining-tent to
+resume their interrupted feast. "_It has all come true!_ With so many
+grafters and claim-jumpers round I daren't be explicit, but I want you
+to know that my luck has turned for good and all. Oh, this time it's no
+pocket; it's the big strike of which I've always dreamed. I don't
+deserve it, some may think, after playing with my girl's credulity, yet
+for her sake I thank God with all my heart that I've won out! Till it's
+staked and recorded I know you'll all keep my secret--but, boys, every
+one of you is in it, the Rainbow Mine!"
+
+The same wonderful delicacy that had marked their treatment of Evelyn
+did not fail her father. The Bully and his gang listened to this speech
+in respectful silence, at its conclusion crying, "Great! Good for you,
+old man! You done grand! Allus knew you'd git thar fer keeps! Sure!
+Betcherlife! That's what!" with every evidence of conviction and
+spontaneous joy. But as he walked off, Durant laughed. He did not need
+to look back to know that fingers were being pointed after him, winks
+interchanged and foreheads tapped significantly, with comment that
+found food for mirth, even while it deplored: "Off his nut fer fair.
+Balmy on the crumpet. Bats in his belfry. Qualifying for Queer Street.
+Plumb crazy. Poor old Lucky!"
+
+Well, let them think so, bless them, since another day would set them
+right and prove him all he claimed to be. And then nothing gold could
+procure would be too good for them, nothing--this rough crew, more beast
+than man, that had yet behaved like more than man to his deceived,
+defenceless girl.
+
+That hour--its memory was seared upon his very soul--the hour of
+Evelyn's arrival in camp that had witnessed the deepest degradation,
+followed immediately by the crowning justification and triumph of his
+career. He visualized it now, as he walked: In the Klondike Delmonico's,
+in her role of Lady Bountiful, Evelyn was dispensing hospitality right
+and left. He alone, her father, dared not enter in. Crushed, crazed, he
+walked back to the spot where he had left young Pierce. Him he found
+still brooding beneath the huge pine, dazed, amid the ruin of his own
+air castles. Then for one bad moment Durant went really mad. Picking up
+the gun he had dropped when an irresistible force drew him to go watch
+the incoming stage, he turned its deadly charge against his fevered
+brain.
+
+With a cry, Walter sprang forward, but not before old Blenksoe, who had
+been watching his associate's actions curiously, seized him, capturing
+the gun. "No yer don't, blast yer!"
+
+"Give it to me, Blenksoe! Of what use is my life to you?"
+
+"Lucky you've been afore, and lucky you may be yet, and when the luck
+turns I'm in it, see?"
+
+"Give it to me!" With a madman's fury, Durant leaped at the other's
+throat, only to be met by a blow that sent him reeling to the ground
+with such force that a young willow bush he clutched at was partially
+uprooted. For a few seconds he lay prone, foaming at the mouth and
+clawing the soil with frenzied impotency. Then of a sudden he paused,
+raised himself, face still downturned, and burst into insane laughter
+that made Pierce's blood run cold.
+
+"Mad! Stark, starin' mad!" Blenksoe turned on his heel.
+
+"There's a squirrel on yonder tree I could bring down for the dogs'
+supper if you'd give me back my gun, Blenksoe," his laughter spent,
+Durant meekly suggested as he scrambled to a sitting posture.
+
+"Fetch her with a stun," was the succinct reply, as, retaining his
+partner's weapon, Blenksoe re-entered the tent.
+
+Acting on the suggestion, Durant gathered up a handful of clots,
+selecting them carefully, and with deliberate aim took long shots at the
+chattering creature on the bough.
+
+"Sit here, beside me, close, Walter," in an undertone he bade the young
+clerk, who still was gazing at him in horrified bewilderment. "But don't
+start or show the slightest surprise at what I am going to say. Oh, tut,
+tut, lad, never fear!" For Pierce seemed disinclined to comply with his
+command. "I am not mad. That is all over, thank God! with all the
+struggle, the heartbreak. _The luck has turned_, do you hear? Yes,
+turned for good and all! Every clot that I am throwing contains
+gold!--careful!" For involuntarily Walter had given vent to an
+ejaculation of amazed incredulity. "Oh, I'm an old prospector, and I see
+indications, and read signs where these grafters pass them by. I've
+always believed in this locality, and now I'm justified. In uprooting
+that willow I unearthed a bonanza!" Pausing in his speech, he renewed
+his attempts on the squirrel's life, and then went on: "Yes, each dull
+handful of earth I throw is a priceless witness that beneath us, on
+this spot, lies the Rainbow Mine----" Breaking off, as he observed old
+Blenksoe watching him narrowly, he rose as if discouraged, with a sigh.
+"My hand shakes. I'm no match to-day even for a squirrel. I'll have to
+give it up." Then, cleverly simulating the foolishly detailed actions of
+one who, having lost his grasp on the great things of life, clutches at
+the trivialities, he set about replanting the willow, stamping down the
+disordered earth about its roots, meanwhile in a pregnant undertone
+continuing his conversation with Walter.
+
+The latter, so between them it was arranged, was to hang about the
+locality, watching for a chance, unobserved, to pick up the valuable
+clots, and these he was to have exchanged for their cash value, for
+current expenses, at a bank so distant that their source could not be
+predicated with any degree of accuracy--a precaution that Durant deemed
+essential in a district where even officialdom was likely to be
+corrupted by the lust for gold. He himself, meanwhile, would watch his
+opportunity, and disappear, without leaving a trace, from Lost Shoe
+Creek, as if madness had indeed possessed him, in order to throw
+Blenksoe off the scent and cause him also to move on, since, as Durant
+rightly conjectured, the pastmaster of graft would not be likely to
+remain in any spot which he thought Lucky had turned down. To-day Walter
+was to meet him here, return with him to the scene of his discovery, aid
+him in staking it, by stealth; journey to the nearest office where
+recording-books were opened, to file the claim with the necessary fee,
+while Durant himself would remain, defending the stakes, if need be,
+with his life. Once his rights legally safeguarded, all the world might
+know. Again Durant laughed in joyful anticipation of his meeting with
+Evelyn, when confession and revelation would come in the same breath.
+Then, impatiently, he looked up and down the trail, wondering at
+Pierce's delay on this day of days, when he heard a low moan among the
+bushes, and, turning, beheld the young man on whose co-operation such
+high hopes depended, lying, bedded in furs, upon a sled, swathed in
+bandages, pallid--a dying man.
+
+"My God! Walter, my poor lad, what does this mean?" exclaimed Durant, in
+horrified accents.
+
+Another moan was the only answer, but reading in the glazing eyes a wish
+to speak, Durant knelt down and bent so that his ear touched the stiff
+lips.
+
+"What is it, Walter?"
+
+"The samples," the young man at last managed to articulate. "The
+mine----"
+
+"Aye, the mine--the samples!" cried Durant, with frantic eagerness. But
+Walter's confession never reached the man he had betrayed. A sudden
+darkness came over Durant. He struggled, but his grasp was pinioned from
+behind. He tried to cry aloud, but his voice was muffled. Swift,
+treacherous hands seized him, gagged him, bound him fast, bore him off,
+blind, mute, a prisoner!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
+
+
+With an effort regaining the composure unwontedly ruffled by Scarlett's
+audacious response to her challenge as to an Irishman's method of
+love-making, while adjusting hat and hair, whose order, as she
+blushingly was conscious, had suffered from the same cause, Evelyn
+hurried toward the fir-encircled spot where she saw Dandy Raish awaiting
+her.
+
+A fellow-passenger aboard the boat that had brought her party up the
+Alaskan coast, Travers had lost no chance to ingratiate himself with
+Evelyn by rendering her all manner of unobtrusive service, so that his
+letter, requesting this appointment, at an out-of-the-way place under
+conditions of absolute secrecy, while exciting her curiosity, caused her
+no alarm. The matter to which he had mysteriously alluded, as of supreme
+importance to herself and her father, she had assumed to refer to
+Durant's vast mining interests. She took it for granted that the
+obliging Mr. Travers was bearer of a remittance that would enable her to
+defy Scarlett's absurd advice in favor of roughing it, and enable her to
+resume her wonted style of luxurious living.
+
+To escape awkward questions, she had decided to turn the expedition into
+a day's outing that should include Sarah and her young companions, thus
+giving her meeting with Travers the appearance of chance. Scarlett's
+unforeseen presence on the scene only added a piquancy to the occasion,
+in her eyes, since she thought it might furnish her with an opportunity
+to put down that estimable but altogether too masterful young man. That
+the opportunity would land her in the young man's arms was something she
+had not reckoned with.
+
+As Travers watched her speeding toward him with glowing cheeks and eyes,
+a lovely picture of blossoming young womanhood between the wintry ground
+and summer sky, something leaped to life in the Dandy's breast that made
+it a hard task for him to greet her with the grave impersonal politeness
+it was his policy to assume, and determined him more than ever to cut
+out "that blasted Scarlett."
+
+After formal salutations had been exchanged, he remarked: "I think I
+saw you speaking with some one in uniform, Miss Durant. I trust it was
+not a member of the Mounted Police?"
+
+"It was Sergeant Scarlett."
+
+"Good heavens! Scarlett, of all men! May I hope you did not mention our
+appointment to him?"
+
+"My appointments are my own affair, Mr. Travers. Please let us get to
+the matter in hand without delay. What is it you have to say to me?"
+
+"I am more anxious than you possibly can be for haste, since to you the
+matter is but one of temporary inconvenience, while to carry it through
+I am risking my very life. But before we go any further I must have your
+sacred promise that what I say is in inviolable confidence."
+
+"Confidences between you and me, Mr. Travers! Aren't you making too much
+of what is probably some ordinary business matter; taking rather an
+undue advantage of my complaisance in granting you this interview?"
+
+"Miss Durant, you wrong me. I tell you that in seeking you I have
+nothing to gain, everything to lose; life, honor, everything! I am
+running this tremendous risk--not, as you think, because you are a
+woman, young, rich, beautiful; but because I owe a debt of gratitude,
+that only life could pay, to your dear father."
+
+"My dear father! You come from him? Then he knows of my arrival! Why
+isn't he here himself to welcome me?" Evelyn's questions came rushing
+eagerly.
+
+"Miss Durant, he cannot come. He is a prisoner."
+
+"A prisoner! What do you mean?" she faltered.
+
+"A captive, rather; held by a gang of desperados for ransom."
+
+"God in heaven!" Evelyn went white. "My daddy!"
+
+"You are faint!" Raish went to her side, supporting her.
+
+"No, no! Thanks, I am all right." Evelyn drew away. "But your pledge of
+secrecy--why, it is preposterous! Every one should be told. The alarm
+given--rewards offered--the country roused!" She moved forward as she
+spoke.
+
+"No, no! Not as you value his life!" Raish held her back. "Listen. One
+incautious word, and your father is a dead man. There are spies about
+us--everywhere. That is why I got you to meet me here--Miss Durant,
+believe me, by raising the hue and cry you will sound your father's
+death-knell."
+
+Evelyn shuddered. "I can't believe----" she began, however,
+incredulously.
+
+"I will explain. Miss Durant, you have been in the district over two
+weeks--the district in which you know your father's interests to lie.
+Yet have you been able to locate him, to obtain one satisfactory answer
+as to his goings and comings, his present whereabouts? Have you not
+invariably been put off with specious generalities--sugar-plums to
+soothe a wayward child? Admit that no man has said to you in definite
+terms, 'Yonder, on such and such a hill, is the camp of Matthew Durant.
+By such and such a trail can you reach him.'"
+
+"Yes, that is true," admitted Evelyn. "Every one puts me off. Still----"
+
+"The reason is," Raish interrupted her, "that no one knows where, among
+those mountains, his prison lies. But that he is a prisoner is public
+property, though not a soul has had the heart to break it to you."
+
+"How cruel to have deceived me!" Evelyn burst into a flood of tears.
+"And all the time he is wondering why I don't rescue him. But with his
+resources what is the difficulty? Why has not he himself bought his
+freedom?"
+
+"Because their price is high--it is your entire fortune--the Rainbow
+Mine--and your father loves you too well to subject you to poverty."
+
+"It is like my father to put me first," sobbed Evelyn, "but doesn't he
+know me better? Does he for a moment think I would weigh any
+consideration on this earth against his safety?"
+
+"Ah!" cried Raish, triumphantly, "I knew you were true blue. That is
+what I told my old friend Durant--but captivity has so preyed on his
+spirits that he is ill--unable to judge----"
+
+"My father ill!" Evelyn clenched her little hands and moaned: "Oh, oh,
+oh! If only I could go to him!"
+
+"Have you the courage?" questioned Raish.
+
+"The courage!" She looked at him, amazed. "If you know how to reach him
+take me to him instantly!"
+
+Raish almost laughed aloud. "Women are dead easy," he mentally
+reiterated, before replying: "Very good." He drew Evelyn's furs closer
+about her neck, protectingly. "I take you at your word. But we must
+invent some excuse for our going off together. We must elude pursuit.
+Above all, we must get rid of your friend, the Irishman."
+
+"I trust Sergeant Scarlett," said Evelyn.
+
+"And so do I!" cried Raish, with assumed cordiality. "I trust that
+excellent young man to do his duty and win promotion at all costs. The
+Sergeant makes love like an Irishman, Miss Durant. Ah, I saw!" he
+checked her protest. "But believe me, not even for your bright eyes will
+he sacrifice his loyalty to the government he serves by countenancing a
+dicker with the thieves, its enemies."
+
+"Let us leave the Sergeant out of the discussion," cried Evelyn, with
+blazing cheeks. "What do you propose?--for by your manner I see you have
+some plan."
+
+"The plan is not mine. I never should have ventured to suggest it,"
+answered Raish. "It is your father's, entirely. He and I were taken
+prisoners together. I, as the unimportant man, financially, am used as
+intermediary, being sent here, on parole, to treat with you for his
+release. Spies are dogging my footsteps. Meanwhile, his life is hostage,
+until I return with you in my charge. Your father, ever scrupulous,
+fearing compromising comment, were you to travel with me alone, day and
+night, as we shall have to do, advised----" He paused, as if delicacy
+made the words difficult. "Miss Durant, he wishes you to go through a
+form of marriage with me first."
+
+"I marry you!" gasped Evelyn.
+
+"As a matter of form only; to be dissolved when your father's freedom is
+secured."
+
+"Never--never! It is impossible!"
+
+"Very good. I will carry back that answer." Raish turned to go. "You
+send your love to him, I suppose, Miss Durant, and as he is a very sick
+man, good-by?"
+
+"Stop," she commanded him. "Give me a few moments. You are _sure_ my
+father said that--about a marriage ceremony?"
+
+"Aye, furthermore, he wrote it," Raish assured her. "Though to clear
+myself from any suspicion of interested motives I begged him to send the
+letter by another messenger. You should already have received it from
+the hand of Walter Pierce."
+
+"Miss Durant! Where is Miss Durant? Oh, Miss Durant!" At the moment
+Maclane's agitated voice came toward them. As Evelyn, responding,
+emerged from the thicket he met her, breathlessly. Chilkat Jo, whom he
+had despatched to Lost Shoe Creek for Evelyn, had returned some time
+before to announce that he had met her by the way, but the minister, not
+expecting her for hours, had to be hunted up among the cabins further
+on, whither he had gone on some errand of mercy. "I only just heard of
+your arrival. How providential that you should have chosen this of all
+days for your expedition! A poor lad--Chilkat Joseph and I found him by
+the wayside--the victim, I fear, of foul play, has brought you tidings
+of your father." As he spoke he was hurrying her toward the spot where
+young Pierce lay.
+
+"Walter Pierce--my father!" Evelyn almost shrieked in her excitement,
+but at a warning sign from Travers, who had followed her, controlled
+herself. "I have been expecting him."
+
+"After all I fear it is too late." Maclane touched pulse and brow. "He
+is beyond human help. He will not speak again." Kneeling by the sled he
+began prayers for the passing soul, when he was interrupted by a cry
+from Evelyn, as Walter's arm, which had rested loosely across his
+breast, fell stiffly by his side, disclosing an open letter which, as
+she saw immediately, was in her father's hand.
+
+"Women are dead easy--women and parsons," chuckled Raish, who had
+adroitly placed the missive where Evelyn found it. Going to her where
+she stood, apart, reading her father's transcription of Nick's behest to
+Gelly, "Well," he asked, "now are you convinced?"
+
+"One moment, please!" Without explanation to him, Evelyn ran up the
+hill where, international formalities complied with, under the two flags
+the Bully was bidding his followers farewell.
+
+"Dear, dear Nick"--she clasped his handcuffed fists in her soft, warm
+palms--"you welcomed me to the district; you are my oldest friend. Tell
+me, when did you last see my father?"
+
+"Lucky? Why, now come ter think of it, Lucky were here not an hour
+since. Fit as a fiddle, now warn't he, boys? Grand reports of the
+Rainbow Mine. Shovelin' out pay-dirt like greased lightnin'! Ain't thet
+so, boys? Sent love, of course, and he'd be in ter see yer ter-morrer.
+His own words, d'ye see? Eh, boys?"
+
+To which the boys, challenged by Nick's fiery eye, loyally responded:
+"Sure! Thet's what! Betcherlife!"
+
+Evelyn looked from face to face and read that, beneath a clumsy mask,
+through heroic but mistaken kindness, ill news was being held back from
+her. "Thank you all so much," she replied, and, turning, ran downhill to
+rejoin Raish.
+
+Sarah intercepted her. "Miss, I think we had ought to be getting back to
+camp. The orphans are behaving scandalous, getting themselves engaged
+three deep. I don't know as you can blame 'em, miss. I suppose it's a
+microbe. I myself have just refused three marriages and two guilty
+loves."
+
+"I shall have to leave you to manage the orphans, Sarah." Evelyn smiled
+an odd smile. "I myself am going to be married and start off on a
+honeymoon immediately."
+
+"You don't say, miss!" The maid raised her eyebrows. "Well, a common
+soldier is hardly in the same social class as my own Scotch intended,
+with a literary turn and a copper proposition, but I will say that
+Sergeant Scarlett looks and acts quite the gentleman."
+
+"Oh, it's not Sergeant Scarlett! It is the Mr. Travers who looked after
+us so civilly aboard the Skagway boat."
+
+Sarah's eyebrow's went up further still. "Indeed, miss! He's very smart
+in his dress, yet--however, I suppose everything goes in a country where
+no one minds the clocks."
+
+Meanwhile, with the assistance of Ikey, Maclane, having covered the
+funereal sled with the Stars and Stripes loaned by Gumboot Annie, drew
+it across to poor Walter's own side of the dividing line, that his
+mortal remains might rest in their native soil.
+
+When he came to seek Evelyn, to consult her about the last rites, she
+met him with a strange request, to the effect that first he should
+unite her with all despatch and secrecy to one Mr. Horatio Travers, whom
+she then and there presented to him.
+
+"My dear young lady!" The minister stared at her. "Isn't this decision
+very sudden? Forgive my interference, but you being alone up here, and
+so young----"
+
+"I'm twenty-two," Evelyn assured him, "and that's middle-aged for a New
+York girl."
+
+In spite of the bravado of her manner, her tone so wholly lacked all
+bridal joyousness that Maclane was impelled to draw her aside and ask:
+"Is this act of your own free will?"
+
+"Heavens, yes!" she asserted, confidently. "No one on earth could make
+me do anything I didn't choose to."
+
+"Nevertheless," the minister demurred, "let me entreat you to defer so
+important a step till you can consult your father."
+
+"It is my father's desire, expressed with an emphasis that makes it
+almost a command," averred Evelyn, solemnly. "And conveyed to me at the
+price of that poor lad's life."
+
+Still dissatisfied, but without sufficing reason for refusing, Maclane
+put the usual questions to the prospective groom. As witness, Travers
+introduced old Blenksoe, who, having disposed of Durant, had ambled up,
+calling him a dear old family retainer--a lifelong friend.
+
+"That's me," corroborated the old sinner. "Rough an' ready, but allus in
+it with Raish. Not only is Raish by nature and eddication fitted to
+adorn the proudest spear, but he's a square proposition. Ye kin safely
+leave it ter Raish, every time."
+
+"Well," reluctantly the minister consented, "where is your license?"
+
+"A license!" exclaimed Travers. "What for?"
+
+"To legalize the marriage," Maclane instructed him. "You must get one
+from the Gold Commissioner or Justice of the Peace."
+
+"Then that queers the show," stated old Blenksoe, "sence thar ain't no
+gold round these here diggings, nor no justice, nor no peace."
+
+"Is there no way of dispensing with it, under exceptional
+circumstances?" Evelyn asked, anxiously. "If you knew how imperative my
+reason for desiring haste----"
+
+"In lieu of it, then," the minister conceded, "I will accept a copy of
+the appropriate clause of the Dominion Marriage Act, signed by the
+Mounted Policeman in charge of the district where Miss Durant resides."
+
+And before Raish, who sprang forward, with an oath, could stop him, he
+had entered the Customs building, calling for Sergeant Scarlett.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+Scarlett looked from Evelyn to Travers and back again, in bewilderment,
+dismay. "Miss Durant," he at last found voice to say, "surely there is
+some mistake! Surely there's no love lost between ye and
+this--gentleman!"
+
+"My private affairs, my feelings, seem to cause a great deal of
+unnecessary comment," remarked Evelyn, hiding her emotion under a mask
+of irony. "May I beg you to refrain from criticism, and to give us the
+requisite authority?"
+
+Scarlett looked at her fixedly, and seeing her control weaken, her color
+change, and her eyes fill and falter beneath his penetrating gaze, shook
+his head. "That I must absolutely decline to do!"
+
+"And why, pray?" she commanded herself to ask.
+
+"Oh, the reason is plain!" Raish sneeringly interposed. "Every one knows
+the Sergeant's own matrimonial aspirations. Every one has heard of the
+cheap device by which on the very day of her arrival he tried to worm
+himself into the favor of my fiancee. If he did but know it, her
+father's chief reason for insisting on the immediate celebration of our
+marriage is to protect her from the persecutions of adventurers!"
+
+"I beg," cried Evelyn, checking Scarlett's furious retort, "that there
+may be no such personalities! Mr. Travers, pray understand that I do
+not, in the least, assent to your characterization of the Sergeant, who,
+up to this moment, has treated me and my friends with the utmost
+delicate consideration and chivalry!"
+
+"Forgive me, dearest"--Raish took her hand. "I spoke too warmly! Yet who
+could blame me? Come, come, my good Sergeant, put your name to that
+paper without further ado, unless you wish to suffer under the
+imputation of sacrificing official honor to personal revenge."
+
+Not deigning to heed the taunt, Scarlett turned to the minister. "I
+can't sign, because down in yonder valley is a lass in a red cloak who
+has a prior claim upon this man."
+
+Raish forced a contemptuous laugh. "The red-cloak, who should not even
+be mentioned in this presence, may stay in the valley for me. My
+acquaintance with the red-cloak belongs to a day before I knew Evelyn.
+She condones the past, accepts the dedication of my future life."
+Drawing Evelyn aside, he whispered, "Don't be alarmed. My pledge holds
+good. This is all bluff, my doing the devoted, to throw them off the
+track." Stooping suddenly he kissed her.
+
+"My young friend," Maclane restrained and admonished Scarlett, "my
+sympathies are yours wholly. But are you not exceeding your authority?"
+
+"Aye," confessed the Irishman, "I'm stretching it a bit, maybe, to fit
+me intuitions. Dominie, I tell ye 'tis a fishy business. Not an hour
+since, the girl was in these arms of mine, lip to lip, and liking it.
+And now, look at her shudder at that fellow's touch."
+
+"Sergeant Scarlett"--breaking from Raish, Evelyn came to him and laid a
+coaxing hand upon his arm--"I know that in your heart you are despising
+me for a cheap coquette. And I deserve it. I have given you cause to
+think the worst of me. I can't explain. But if you could only read my
+heart--could only know what this means to me--it's the happiness of my
+life! It will be misery to the end of my days if I fail him at this
+supreme test. You're magnanimous, above all pettiness, I know. You
+simply want to save me, as you think, from making a mistake. But believe
+me, trust me, I know what I'm about. Now, will you do me the greatest
+favor one human being ever entreated of another, by signing your name to
+that document?"
+
+Scarlett looked tenderly down on her, and, swayed against his judgment
+by her earnestness, he might have yielded, had not the Dandy
+inopportunely added the word too much.
+
+"Sergeant Scarlett will hardly dare take the consequences of refusing
+when I tell him that without the protection of my name Miss Durant will
+be irretrievably compromised!"
+
+Scarlett checked an almost overwhelming impulse to kick the speaker.
+Instead, he took Evelyn's cold fingers into his honest grasp. "I'd give
+my name to shield ye, my life to serve ye, and now I'm going to risk my
+official honor, to--as I think, to save ye." He tore up the paper.
+
+Above the general outcry that ensued, Sarah's tones were heard. "A
+pretty country where you can't marry whom you please! America's good
+enough for me!"
+
+"America!" exclaimed Evelyn, struck by a sudden thought. "Are there
+such restrictions with us in America?"
+
+"Unfortunately not, my dear," replied Maclane, who had once occupied a
+Chicago pastorate. "In the States the sacred tie is made and broken far
+more easily."
+
+"Then, quick," she cried, "across the boundary!" And seizing Travers'
+hand she ran, the others following breathlessly, not halting till she
+reached the tall mast from which proudly floated the emblem of the free.
+
+"God in Heaven!" Scarlett looked after her, his personal grief swallowed
+up in anxiety. "Is there no power above, below, to stop a wilful woman
+from cutting her own throat with a wedding-ring?" He cast about for aid.
+Barney, who might have thrown some light on the plot, had returned to
+duties at headquarters, but Nick and Gelly might yet be reached in time,
+and for them he sent messengers flying. Meanwhile, he bethought himself
+of Chilkat Jo. Sheltered by the Customs water-butt, he found the trader
+squatting peaceably, whittling a mimic totem-pole. On his shoulder
+Scarlett laid a gauntleted hand. "Chilkat Jo, man, look what devil's
+work is going on forninst ye! Can't ye say the word to stop it?"
+
+There was an appreciable pause while, with a silken sound, the soft
+shavings curled, fell, under the skilful knife. Then without looking up,
+the Siwash gently replied, "Me no such godam-hellan-blazes Clistian
+fool! Laish mally Missy Dulant! I mally Gelly!"
+
+In desperation Scarlett strode toward the bridal group, reaching it just
+as the minister's solemn tones rolled forth, challenging the wilderness
+to show just cause or impediment why these two persons might not
+lawfully be joined together.
+
+"Just or unjust," he shouted, "sure it's myself will furnish the
+impediment"--as, collaring the bridegroom, with a series of violent
+jerks he sent him flying back into precincts that rendered him amenable
+to Dominion law, where he neatly knocked him down, and sat on him. "Now,
+I've got ye in my own jurisdiction, I'll detain ye as a suspicious
+person till evidence for or against ye is forthcoming!" Maclane's
+protests, Evelyn's tears, Sarah's shrieks and taunts, and old Blenksoe's
+curses were as unavailing as Raish's struggles; the young giant held the
+position by main force till Nick, who had been easily overtaken, by
+courtesy of his custodians arrived in response to the recall.
+
+"There, there," Scarlett soothed the squirming Dandy. "If I find I'm
+mistaken; if that damned incriminating face of yours belies ye, sure
+I'll apologize in sackcloth and give ye the satisfaction of a
+gentleman." Jerking Travers to his feet, he confronted him with Gelly's
+father. "Nick," he inquired, "what is your unvarnished opinion of this
+fellow?"
+
+"Wa'al, thar's things in his past," admitted the Bully, "same as in most
+men's, thet you wouldn't hold up as a shinin' example to a
+Sunday-school, d'ye see? But bygones is bygones. Arter wot he projected
+ter-day, I've nought but good words fer Dandy Raish."
+
+"Not another syllable, Nick, I beg," Travers hastened to cut short the
+Bully's elogium at a period so favorable to his plans. "Now, Sergeant,
+we accept your apology for your ill-directed zeal, and dispense with
+your further company."
+
+"Say, Scarlett," wrathfully demanded Nick, "I kin cheek yer now I'm
+goin' ter be hanged by U. S. law! Take yer hands off'n Raish! Wot the
+hell d'ye mean by damagin' my son-in-law?"
+
+"Your son-in-law?" in one breath cried Evelyn, Sarah and Maclane.
+
+"I sent my gal a letter," elucidated Nick. "Your pop Lucky put it in
+writin' fer me, Missy. That's it you got in your hand."
+
+"This letter! And that villain made me believe---- Oh, oh, oh!" Evelyn
+burst into a flood of humiliated tears.
+
+"You black scoundrel; you'd 'a' deceived her as you deceived my gal!"
+Nick made a blind rush at Raish, but was held back by his custodians.
+"Sure as thar's a God in Heaven, Raish," he vowed, as they restrained
+him, "I'll live ter kill ye yet!"
+
+Vain threat! A sharp sound cleft the crystal air and, echoing, died away
+in soft detonations among the hills. The Dandy threw up his hands as he
+had forced so many luckless travelers to do in his career of highway
+robbery, and fell, gracefully, as he did everything, face downward, with
+a little trickle of blood, upon the snow. With a shriek of anguish a
+girl in a red cloak, who had been speeding up the hill, threw herself
+beside him, calling his name with all the loving epithets that even the
+lowest of the low seems able to win from some woman's heart.
+
+Tears wrung from his being's depths for baffled retribution coursing
+down his rough cheeks, the Bully lifted pinioned hands to Heaven and
+uttered the one prayer of his life: "O Almighty Gawd, with all respect,
+why did You butt in? O Gawd! I've made cold meat of a score o' men on
+end from fust ter last! But they was jes' accident or playfulness, d'ye
+see? This here skunk were the only livin' thing I ever hankered fer ter
+kill! And Thou hast called my bluff, and took the wind outen my sails by
+puttin' the shootin'-iron of my vengeance inter another's hand! Thar
+ain't no four-flushin' Thee, O Gawd! Thou hast plumb squared the
+reckonin' fer all my sins, past and ter come, world without end. Amen."
+
+Whose the hand that shot Dandy Raish no one ever knew, though many a
+young fool, in his cups, boasted of the high distinction. In the case of
+a man so universally detested perhaps official enquiry thought it policy
+to rest. But, possessed at the moment by a literal interpretation of
+duty, with a heavy heart the good minister sought his favorite Indian
+proselyte.
+
+Sitting beside him, where he found him whittling peaceably in the
+shelter of the Customs water-butt, "O Joseph, Chilkat Jo," sighing, he
+began. "My son, if on your hands there be blood-guiltiness, you must
+repent, confess!"
+
+The soft shavings slithered, curled and fell, as the emblem of the Raven
+and the Frog grew beneath the skilful knife. Then, in unimpassioned
+monotone, the Indian remarked, "Some day, when I velly old, old chief, I
+lepent, confess, make godam-hellan-blazes Clistian deathbed. But
+now----" He paused to twist the weird features of his tribal god into an
+inscrutable smile. "Now, I mally Gelly."
+
+It was the cool of the evening. From behind the mountains northern
+lights shot up in streamers of living green and rose. There was a sound
+of bells, and "mushing," as the drivers harnessed up their dog-teams to
+carry the picnickers back to camp. Scarlett looked over at Evelyn with
+an odd contraction of the heart, where the bud of hope was trembling for
+life under the icy hand of circumstance, but as she did not appear to
+notice him he turned and went on his own road without farewell.
+
+Then Evelyn went to Gelly where, the violence of her grief spent, she
+still crouched beside her lover's stiffening form. Putting an arm about
+her, "Come. Come home with me to live," she said. "Yes." For Gelly
+looked up with resentment changing to incredulity. "Please. As a favor
+to me. I have so much to learn. I need you."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A YEAR AFTER
+
+
+Winter had come and gone; spring had passed into a new summer. In the
+prosperous township of Lost Shoe Creek no one would have recognized the
+god-forsaken camp of the year before. While the locality was generally
+condemned as an auriferous proposition, its situation fitted it
+admirably for base of supplies to other creeks: Abe Lincoln, Jubilee,
+Old Glory and Princess May, where hydraulic machinery had been
+established and placer claims were being worked with profitable, if not
+phenomenal, results.
+
+Some critics attributed the marvelous transformation that had taken
+place to the presence of women, dating from the arrival of Evelyn and
+her party; others to the gospel tidings of good-will brought by Parson
+Maclane, when, wild rose in buttonhole, and followed by his dogs,
+Telegraph and Wrangel, he came running on the trail. A third faction
+was for giving the credit to law and order, personified by the
+ubiquitous young soldier, Sergeant Scarlett, and his right-hand man,
+Barney. But the wise set it down to the trinity of saving influences.
+
+For Evelyn the time had been one of unusual happiness. Learning early
+that the boundless wealth of which she supposed herself possessor was
+not a popular subject among folk to whom daily bread came hardly, she
+wisely decided to omit mention of it from her conversation. Also,
+finding herself likely to be embarrassed for ready money, since credit
+was denied her, she followed Scarlett's excellent advice to try roughing
+it, with excellent results. Moreover, at the suggestion of the good
+Graysons, whose neighborliness she soon learned to value, and loyally
+backed by the "boys," she opened a real-estate office at Lost Shoe
+Creek, with a branch at Perdu, showing herself an admirable business
+woman. Amateur theatricals, concerts, and ice-carnivals had brightened
+the dark season, when mining-camps in the North are as desert islands,
+cut off from all communication with the outside; and for the first time
+in her life Evelyn tasted the unalloyed pleasure that springs from
+giving pleasure and helpfulness that money cannot buy. One sorrow only
+dimmed her sky: the continued absence of her father. No one told her
+that, far and wide, official search was being made for Matthew Durant,
+nicknamed Lucky, who, on a fateful day of the previous summer had
+disappeared as utterly as had the earth in which he worked opened to
+engulf him; she still believed, uncontradicted, that his vast interests
+were detaining him somewhere among the baffling distances of snow-capped
+hills, and that any hour that suited him would bring him back to her.
+
+[Illustration: THE UBIQUITOUS YOUNG SOLDIER, SERGEANT SCARLETT.]
+
+It was the day when, by the most lovable of paradoxes, in that region,
+two festivals--one of independence declared, one of allegiance
+covenanted--are celebrated, with crossed flags: Dominion Day and the
+Fourth of July, in one.
+
+On this particular anniversary gala preparations of extra splendor were
+afoot in honor of the return of Bully Nick, once more a free man, not
+because in equity he was held worthy to be at large, so much as through
+a technical slip by which but six jurors had been requisitioned to sit
+on his case, whereas, as his backers claimed, he was territorially
+entitled to be adjudged guilty by a full dozen good men and true.
+
+"Well, I'm dazzled fer fair," announced the hero, as, amid cheers from
+his friends and followers, he alighted from the stage. "This here
+bloomin' Paradise ain't never Lost Shoe Creek."
+
+"Sure, 'tis! Betcherboots! That's what!" he was assured.
+
+Nick rubbed astonished eyes. "By gum, a Gospel-mill!"
+
+"Aye, and filled to overflowing every Sabbath, Nicholas," proudly stated
+good Maclane.
+
+"Wa'al, y' see," Mops hastened to apologize to his leader for this hated
+concession to religion, "the gals like piousness."
+
+The neat jail next the church was described by Barney as "just an impty
+forrum intoirely, owing to the ladies' distaste for the spacies of bird
+such cages are controived for, begorra!"
+
+The decorative touch to the personal appearance of his followers, in
+honor of the holiday, naturally came in for the Bully's quizzical
+attention: their shorn faces; the soap "with the tony smell" in vogue;
+the paper collars with jeweled studs in which, all day, Ikey had been
+doing a rushing trade, were noted by him categorically till Bill
+silenced him by stating that "style was like for to fetch the girls."
+
+Gumboot Annie, to whose hostelry he was conducted to drink his own
+health, had been allowed to reopen, he was informed, under close
+restriction and surveillance from "that blamed Scarlett." Nevertheless,
+as she told Nick, spitting with deliberation, not being in business for
+salubrious ends merely, she was making great profit out of "moderate
+drinkin' and no drunks," through the girls' preference for sober
+cavaliers. Or, as she phrased it, "the gals won't swaller the booze."
+
+This was too much for the Bully's equanimity. "The gals, indeed!"
+Slapping his knee, he chuckled. "The hell!"
+
+"Eh, Nicholas?" the minister challenged him. "Did I understand you to
+say 'the hell?'"
+
+"The hell you did, Parson!" The Bully turned on him truculently. "And
+what the hell hev you agin it?"
+
+"If no better argument, Nicholas," smiled Maclane, "the girls won't
+stand for hell."
+
+"Parson," Nick acknowledged his defeat, "the drinks is on me." Later he
+took occasion to state, "I ain't convarted. But, say, Parson, you're
+jes' the squarest proposition Gawd ever grub-staked ter prospect fer
+human souls, and, say--I won't oppose you none. And when I pass in my
+checks jes' you stand by my grave, and put up a little prayer fer my
+epitaffy, 'He done his level damnedest, angels cud no more. Amen.'"
+Then he took from Gelly's arms the fine infant she had brought to show
+him, described by its fond father as "a velly godam skukum Clistian
+baby." Dandling it tenderly, "See here, son," he adjured it, "ef I find
+indications of you takin' arter me--gamblin', cussin', drinkin',--why,
+grandpop 'ull spankee, d'ye see?"
+
+His mind thus freed, his future pacific course outlined, Nick inquired,
+circumstantially for "the girls." Sarah, he learned, was the great lady
+of the place, making a large income as a "lady-barber," her firm hand,
+unshaken as her masculine competitors were apt to be by sprees, making
+her a peculiarly safe artist to be trusted to operate with a razor in
+the region of the jugular, and her husband's copper proposition still
+remaining an undeveloped asset, she was forcing him to work for regular
+wage as a teamster. In spite of which, on his occasional lapses Sandy
+was wont to boast that at heart he was "a mon for a' that."
+
+The orphans all had settled down; Mary, having discovered a new violet
+at the foot of a glacier, had paired off with the young botanist who had
+been sent out from Ottawa to report on the flora of the region. Ruth was
+running postoffice and postmaster. Ethel and the town doctor had made a
+match. Kate's lot was cast with Bill, now doing assessment work and
+writing to his mother regularly. Effie had pre-empted the young editor
+of the weekly _Claim_, helping both to write his editorials and set them
+up in type. Gertrude had struck it rich with the bank manager. All would
+be on hand at the ball to-night. No, Evelyn had not made a choice. Rumor
+assigned her to Scarlett, yet how matters stood between them no man
+could say with certainty.
+
+At this the Bully's eye took on a fiery glow. "Ef thet thar uniformed
+cuss is a-playin' fast an' loose with Lucky's gal, d'ye see, it's up ter
+me to set it straight!" And, forthwith, he led the way to Evelyn's
+bower.
+
+Evelyn was found, outside her cabin, superintending the arrangements for
+a grand display of fireworks in honor of the double holiday; the
+crowning piece to show the two flags crossed beneath a wondrous rainbow.
+By a coincidence that exactly suited the Bully's plans, Scarlett was, at
+the minute, seen approaching. After greetings had been interchanged with
+all heartiness, suddenly the young soldier found himself surrounded by
+the men--Nick, in the center, pointing a gun at his heart. Evelyn
+shrieked, and would have interposed, but was forced back by hands
+roughly tender, tenderly peremptory.
+
+"Well, boys," asked Scarlett, calmly, "is this some new kind of game?"
+
+"Thet's as mebbe," answered Nick. "See here, Missy Durant, it ain't
+human natur fer a gal ter stay single in a minin'-camp."
+
+"That's what!" the boys interrupted him to say.
+
+"And I reckon you've had your pick of every miner an' prospector in the
+district--aye, and loafer, worthy of the name!"
+
+"Sure! Betcherlife!" the boys confirmed him.
+
+"Now," concluded the Bully, magnificently, "the question we're debatin'
+is jes' this: Hev you give this here blamed Scarlett the mitten, or hev
+you not?"
+
+Evelyn laughed merrily. "To tell the truth, Nick, he hasn't given the
+opportunity--as yet."
+
+"And I wouldn't take it if she gave it me," added the soldier, referring
+to the mitten.
+
+The Bully looked from one to the other, and, in spite of their enigmatic
+replies, reading in the glances they exchanged some happy understanding,
+surrendered for good and all.
+
+"Boys," he announced, "the drinks, as usual, is on us when we run up
+agin the church, perlice, and gals--Here, Parson." He handed his weapon
+to Maclane who, fearing trouble, had hurried to the spot. "Keep this
+here shootin'-iron. I ain't fit ter be trusted with it, d'ye see? When I
+want a shot at moose or ptarmigan I'll borrow the loan of it from you."
+
+"That's what! Betcherlife!" applauded the boys.
+
+When, at last, they found themselves left together, Evelyn held up a
+mocking finger at her lover. "To think you had to be coerced! For
+shame!"
+
+"I wanted to give ye time," he explained, "to feel surer of yourself and
+me."
+
+"I knew it," she exclaimed. "You feared I might suspect you of
+interested motives. But the surest proof of my love for you has been my
+certainty that you care for me for myself alone, not for what I bring."
+
+"That's the sweetest thing that ever has come from your lips," announced
+the soldier. "Not another word till I taste a sweeter."
+
+He was about to illustrate his meaning when Barney's voice was heard,
+discreetly inquiring of the landscape for "himself."
+
+Affecting, for the first time, to perceive his superior, "Och, are ye
+there, sorr?" saluting, he inquired.
+
+"Here or there, I'm beside myself with joy," remarked Scarlett _sotto
+voce_. "Well, Barney, what's that you bring?"
+
+"If appearances are not desayving, sorr, I'm thinking 'tis a letther.
+Our rint-roll, I'm thinking." He stood by with an air of partnership
+while Scarlett opened the envelope.
+
+"Your rent-roll!" Puzzled, Evelyn looked at the address. "'Sir Gerald
+Scarlett.' Is that some joke?"
+
+"A hereditary wan, begorra," Barney hastened to assure her. "It runs in
+our family."
+
+"More roll than rent, though." Scarlett held out to her a long, legally
+drawn-up document.
+
+"Not to mintion the castle," remarked Barney.
+
+"Just a ruin in a bit of a potato patch," Scarlett hastened to apologize
+for his ancestral glories.
+
+"And a cow to chaperon it--God bless her!" Barney saluted respectfully,
+as he turned to go.
+
+Sir Gerald looked down on his lady-love with laughing eyes.
+
+"My offence is rank," he quoted.
+
+"Oh, it's not an unpardonable sin," Evelyn assured him, also laughing,
+but confused. "What a goose you must have thought me all this time--the
+way I have condescended to you!"
+
+"The greater my triumph in winning you on my own recognizances," he
+replied.
+
+Evelyn held him at arms' length, contemplatively. "What a difference,"
+she remarked, "between the myself of to-day and of a year ago! Then I
+should have suspected myself of being influenced by this--but now
+nothing seems to matter so much as that we care for each other."
+
+"Miss Durant! O Miss Durant!" The lovers broke apart as, by a cross-cut
+through the bushes, the minister came hurrying toward them. "Here
+is--some one who brings you news of your father."
+
+He pointed to an elderly man who, with lagging footstep, followed him.
+
+"Of daddy? Hurrah!" Evelyn clapped her hands. "That was the one thing
+needed to complete my happiness! How is he? And where? Why hasn't he
+come to me himself?" she demanded impatiently of the stranger.
+
+"Our friend here has traveled far," Maclane gently reminded her. "He is
+worn and spent."
+
+"Oh, how thoughtless I am!" As Evelyn placed the newcomer in a
+comfortable chair she noticed that his features, as she saw them between
+his slouch hat and heavy beard, were pinched, and that his frame was
+bowed beyond his years, as if from recent suffering. "How tired you
+look! You have been ill?" she asked him considerately.
+
+"He has undergone great hardships for the sake of a dearly loved
+daughter," Maclane hastened to explain. "He has escaped with but little
+besides his life. But for that let us give thanks. Let us make him feel
+that, so long as he is spared, his daughter will not mind poverty."
+
+"To be sure!" Evelyn tried not to show the impatience she felt at the
+concerns of outsiders being placed before her own, with a touch of her
+old patronizing manner adding, "And I dare say my father and I can
+arrange matters so that this good man's daughter need not complain of
+poverty."
+
+The stranger opened his lips to speak, but unable to command himself,
+turned his head aside with a slight groan.
+
+With an inexplicable foreboding, Evelyn looked from him to Maclane, and
+in the latter's kind eyes reading a deep pity, "What is wrong?" she
+faltered. "Has anything happened to my father?"
+
+"Nothing that sympathy and loving care cannot cure," replied the
+minister. "Mr. Durant was on his way to you a year ago when he fell into
+the power of ruffians, even as Travers, for his own evil purposes,
+informed you. After serious ill-treatment at their hands he escaped, but
+so broken in mind and body that for months he wandered about, unable to
+fix his own identity or put himself in communication with his friends.
+Now, thank God, he is almost cured."
+
+"He shall be completely so, if, as you say, love can accomplish it."
+Evelyn started up. "I'll go to him at once." She addressed the stranger.
+"Where is he?"
+
+"First----" Again Maclane hurriedly interposed. "There is something you
+should know about your father's finances. He is not rich, as you think
+him. By incessant toil from time to time he used to make vast sums, as
+miners are apt to do--and as miners are apt to do, he spent as fast as
+he made, his one extravagance being your pleasure. But the inexhaustible
+supply, the purse of Fortunatus--that was a fable that somehow grew up
+between your romanticism and his optimism. It does not exist. It never
+has existed. To-day he is absolutely penniless."
+
+The words rained on her like hailstones. Evelyn met them, standing
+erect, very white and still.
+
+At last, "I do not grasp your meaning," she replied. "Every one in the
+district knows that my father is a very rich man."
+
+"Not so." Maclane shook his head. "Every one knows the reverse; has
+always known it. Believe me, my child, what I tell you is true."
+
+"My father's wealth does not exist." Evelyn's mind seemed to take slow,
+cautious steps backward over the minister's statements, with every
+impact feeling surer of the truth. "To-day he is absolutely penniless.
+Every one knows it; has always known it. Then why," she demanded with
+sudden passion, "has it been kept from me?"
+
+"Out of kindness," replied Maclane, simply.
+
+"Kindness!" Evelyn laughed scornfully, hysterically; calmed herself,
+then laughed again. "Kindness! When I recall how I used to brag of what
+my wealth would do for the place--and all the time, poor fool that I am,
+I have been the laughing-stock----"
+
+"Again not so," emphatically said Maclane. "Think how quickly you fell
+into our primitive ways, becoming the heart and spirit of the camp.
+Believe me, Evelyn, you have endeared yourself, accomplished a thousand
+times as much by this year's bread-winning toil and good-fellowship as
+had you been the Lady Bountiful you started out to be. It isn't money
+that builds up camps, closing dives and opening reading-rooms--it's
+neighborliness--working and suffering with people, side by side. And in
+all his grief, remorse for your bitter disappointment, your poor father
+may take this comfort: that it has been the making of you as a woman,
+just as you, the real woman, have been the making of the camp."
+
+"Thank you." Evelyn spoke in a hard little dry voice. "Some day I may
+bring myself to see it in that light." She took a few steps to and fro,
+then came to a standstill opposite the minister. "Mr. Maclane, I want
+you to give my love to the 'boys'--to all who, by their silence, have
+shielded me as they thought, from the painful truth. Tell them that I
+appreciate it. Also ask them to try not to show that they pity me. I'm
+going to do something that's not easy for me. It would be easiest to go
+away to a strange place, where I could hide my head--but I have my poor
+father to think of. I have a good business here, which will support us
+both decently, at least. I shall bring him here to care for him--and
+mind! not one word of reproach, or mockery, is he ever to hear from any
+one! Not one word!"
+
+"Bravely spoken," cried Maclane. "Oh, there's happiness in store for
+you, my child. You'll see."
+
+"Together, sweetheart!" Scarlett, who had been standing by in mute
+distress for her great trouble, now came to her and took her hand.
+"We'll fight it out together--you and I."
+
+"Oh, no." Evelyn wrenched her hand from him. "That is all over. Things
+are changed with me. My eyes are open at last. I can forgive every one
+but you, Sir Gerald Scarlett--you who let me condescend to you, lead you
+on--and finally almost do the asking!"
+
+"Faith, your eyes may be open, but they don't see as straight as they
+did when closed," Scarlett indignantly contradicted her. "I've loved ye
+all along, and sooner; since the moment I saw your picture smiling up to
+me among the roses."
+
+"We won't discuss it. I only know"--Evelyn's voice broke--"I never want
+to see you again."
+
+"But if only I could make people understand--believe in me----"
+
+The stranger, who, all this time, had been sitting bowed forward,
+his face buried in his hands, suddenly broke forth. "It's not a
+fable! The Rainbow Mine--it's _true!_ I discovered it the day--but
+where--where--where? My God, where?" He looked about wildly.
+
+Evelyn turned sharply on the speaker. "Who are you?"
+
+Matthew Durant, his passion spent, lifted streaming eyes to his
+daughter's face. "Don't you know me, Evie?"
+
+"Oh, no, no! You're not--oh, daddy!" Falling on her knees beside him,
+she gathered the feeble form into her strong young arms.
+
+Then Maclane led Scarlett quietly away.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+Within the cabin her father was resting peacefully. While eating the
+food she set before him, he told Evelyn the history of his wonderful
+discovery, as it came back, fragmentarily, to his blurred memory, and
+she, the better to bring him back, as she thought, to sanity, humored
+his delusion by not betraying incredulity.
+
+At the mission where he had been tended during the long illness that
+followed his captivity, so he explained, he had purposely given a
+fictitious name and account of himself, lest the truth should somehow
+reach Blenksoe, thus furnishing the clue to the whereabouts of the
+unstaked mine, which precaution also accounted for his having eluded the
+diligent search that the Mounted Police had never ceased to prosecute
+since his disappearance. From Blenksoe, however, he had no longer
+anything to fear; that arch-conspirator having gone the way of his
+leader, Dandy Raish, by the avenging bullet from some victim's hand.
+
+And, now, please God, he concluded, restored health would bring back
+recollection, enabling him to unearth the pot of gold to which the
+heavenly sign had pointed him.
+
+When, at last, her loving tendance had won him to sleep, Evelyn went out
+into the cool air, to draw a long breath and readjust her reckonings
+with life that the day's events had thus cruelly disturbed.
+
+It was the sunset's glowing aftermath that, to the pilgrims of the
+north, alone justifies a long journey from conditions that those
+hide-bound with conventions are inclined to associate with creature
+comfort, opening a new wonderland of beauty. In such regions where
+nature is elemental, man becomes elementary, feeling himself in the
+Almighty's workshop, in close communication with the powers of life,
+dealt with, not by subtle processes that the artificial conditions of
+city life have engendered, but swiftly, directly, summarily, as in the
+days of burning bush and pillars of flame.
+
+Gazing over the now prosperous township of Lost Shoe Creek, across the
+lake, to the colossal mountains shutting it in from that "outside," to
+which even miners so heavily under the mysterious spell of the North
+that nothing ever could induce them to forsake it, still never ceases
+fondly to speak of as "God's country," Evelyn seemed to herself to be
+born again. Had she known it, it was then that she attained the noblest
+moment of her being, resolving, even as she already had resolved to meet
+it bravely, also to meet this uncompromising blow of providence without
+bitterness; if possible with love.
+
+Hearing Durant move within, she was about to go to him when her
+attention was arrested by a tatterdemalion figure at her gate,
+beseeching charity.
+
+"Mademoiselle--peety ze poor!"
+
+"Alphonse!" she exclaimed, recognizing the once jaunty person of her
+former courier, alias Count St. Hilaire.
+
+Alphonse, who had not thought of her from that day to this, in turn
+recognizing her, hastened to attribute his present pitiful plight as the
+deserved vengeance of an outraged Heaven for his baseness in despoiling
+one of its own angels of kodak and motorcar. "But," he wept, "zese
+fruits of sin did not long time 'dure. Ze automobile she bust, zen I
+bust--and now--I have a such hunger."
+
+In spite of the weight of sadness at her heart, Evelyn could not but
+smile. It was one of the jests of the great powers--jests that are,
+nevertheless, always tinged with irony, this confronting her with the
+scarecrow of her whilom splendor at the supreme hour of her misery.
+
+Grateful for food which he devoured eagerly, overwhelmed by the gift of
+a small sum she bestowed on him to enable him to prosecute his journey,
+Alphonse sought some expression of his feelings beyond his mere copious
+Gallic thanks. He was selling photographs for a living, and he besought
+mademoiselle, could she bring herself to overlook the regrettable fact
+that they were the product of her own camera, to accept the choicest
+example of his art--a veritable triumph, an arc-en-ciel--a rainbow!
+
+Involuntarily, Evelyn shuddered at the word. Would the gods never cease
+their mocking sport, she wondered, even while with becoming graciousness
+she thanked Alphonse and sent him on his way, rejoicing. She still held
+the picture in her hand, carelessly, occupied with her thoughts, when
+she heard a cry from Durant, who had come out without her noticing him,
+and was looking over her shoulder.
+
+"My God! Evelyn! Look," he cried. "The mine--The Rainbow!"
+
+"Father, dear," she sought to soothe him, "it is nothing--merely a
+chance photograph."
+
+"Nothing? It is my witness, my record," answered Durant. "No, Evie, I'm
+not mad. This clears away the last cloud. Examine it carefully." Getting
+out his prospector's glass, he polished the lens carefully and held it
+over the photograph.
+
+Evelyn looked, as she was bidden, at first merely to humor him, then
+with awakening interest as, under the glass's magnifying power, she
+studied the picture in detail. In his passion for the picturesque
+Alphonse had, indeed, put her camera to good use. In this composition he
+had caught a striking moment: Durant himself, in his rough miner's garb,
+standing with arms flung up, as if in thankfulness to Heaven, while near
+by, beside a half-uprooted willow-bush, knelt Walter Pierce with an
+expression of wonder on his young face; while in the background, beyond
+the creek, stood the imperturbable mountains, spanned by a faint,
+elusive rainbow.
+
+"This is the very spot!" Durant laughed like a happy boy. "Lost Shoe
+Creek! Fancy forgetting even the name!--I had always believed in it,
+though every other miner turned it down. It had shared the fate of
+hundreds of other northern camps: a new strike; a stampede,
+prospectors, traders, grafters, from all quarters rushing madly in;
+then, disappointment, failure, starvation, desertion to new fields. It
+became the most god-forsaken place on earth--an abandoned camp drained
+of everything but the dregs of its population. I alone held on, having a
+nose for gold, and scenting it right here, and now and then coming on
+indications: Blenksoe, Raish, and all the other grafters meanwhile
+dogging my steps to profit by any strike I might make, jump my claim,
+and make away with me!--Oh, this brings it all back, this picture:
+Walter Pierce; your coming; how Nick and the boys covered up my
+humiliation; my trying to kill myself; and then--the gold!"
+
+While he was speaking, he had hurried to the clearing at the back of the
+cabin, comparing the lay of the land with the picture, Evelyn following
+with keenest anxiety at this new phase of his delusion, yet not knowing
+how to restrain him.
+
+"Father, dear, don't," she remonstrated, seeing him uprooting a willow
+with frenzied eagerness. "Why, that's the bush on which I spread out my
+wash."
+
+But Durant only laughed and went on spading up the soft earth with a bit
+of wood. Wild as were his actions, his face and bearing had regained
+all their old, light-hearted poise. He was as Evelyn always had known
+him on his occasional visits to her, when they spent money like princes
+and amused themselves like children.
+
+Soon he threw his improvised tool aside. "Here we are! Look at this,
+Evie!"
+
+Evelyn took the substance he handed to her, and, as the earth crumbled
+from it, saw that it was of irregular shape, and oddly indented, as
+though some underground giant had chewed it with Titanic teeth before
+spewing it up for man's good or ill, as fate might decree. A slight,
+bluish hue with which it first met the eye melted softly into that
+indefinable lustre that proclaims gold and only gold--the lust for which
+is more potent than the love of woman, wine; in whose quest more lives
+have been sacrificed than for any other cause since the world began; for
+whose possession souls innumerable are being bartered every day.
+
+"A sixty-dollar nugget," Durant appraised it, weighing it in his expert
+hand, "and valuable merely as an earnest of what lies beneath--just a
+chip of the old block; a clue to the great Lode! Now, to take possession
+formally!" He paced the ground, whittled and marked the stakes, and was
+preparing to post them, when a sudden thought arrested him. "But--the
+land now lies within the township limits!" he groaned. "Oh, my girl,
+what, if, after all, my luck should fail you!"
+
+Evelyn smiled happily. "I think I can come to your assistance in that
+matter. If you will call to-morrow morning at the office of E. Durant
+you can acquire the mineral rights from the present owner of the lot,
+who happens to be--myself. Then you can record it as soon as the
+Commissioner's books are open."
+
+"But----" Durant looked about with a touch of the furtive apprehension
+that had shadowed his recent life, and that never wholly left him.
+"Suppose some one has seen--how can I defend it?"
+
+"Oh," cried Evelyn, "no fear about that! There are no claim-jumpers in
+this camp, thanks to Scarlett of the Mounted."
+
+"Aye, Scarlett. A fine fellow that. He did me a great kindness last
+year," said her father. "It began by his finding your picture, which I
+had dropped, and giving it back to me. If my foresight had been equal to
+my hindsight, I should have confided my discovery to him as soon as I
+made it, and so saved you this year of bitter experience, my girl."
+
+"Well, daddy," replied Evelyn, "if you haven't suffered too much by it,
+not only do I not regret it, but I'm glad. It has taught me to value the
+gifts of the mother Lode infinitely less, and infinitely more, than
+formerly. I can hardly wait overnight to claim my pot of gold from the
+rainbow's foot--but I'm humbler about the possession of wealth than I
+used to be. And I want the whole camp to be 'in it.'"
+
+"And so they shall, my girl," responded Durant, heartily. Then, as two
+figures came in sight, "There goes the Sergeant now, with Mr. Maclane,
+passing by the gate. Suppose we begin with them, Evie. Suppose we call
+them in and tell them all about it." He already was summoning them.
+
+"Suppose, for the present, you take charge of Mr. Maclane," amended
+Evelyn, as the two drew near, "and leave the Sergeant to me."
+
+Scarlett and the minister were bent on some errand in another quarter of
+the town, but by tacit consent had taken the road past Evelyn's cabin,
+actuated, in the case of the older man, by a kind wish not to lose sight
+of her for long, and in the case of the lover by the force that guides
+all steps toward the beloved. For, dismissed as he had been, and
+dejected as he found himself accordingly, yet in his heart of hearts
+there still lurked a hope that she might relent toward him. When,
+therefore, they saw Evelyn, radiant, and beckoning to them from the
+veranda, they joined her and her father with alacrity. Nor did good
+Maclane need any suggestion from Durant that the two young people should
+be left to make their peace unaided.
+
+"Sergeant Scarlett," Evelyn began when the older men had withdrawn to
+examine Durant's discovery, "I want to beg your pardon for the way I
+treated you this afternoon! I felt bitter, cheated--oh, it wasn't your
+fault one bit; it was my own, which was why I was so angry with you. And
+you--all along you have behaved so generously to me--nobly!--Yes, let me
+finish," she cried, retreating from the advance with which he sought to
+interrupt her. "I shall always think it--but I may not ever be in the
+mood to tell you again quite how well I think of you."
+
+"But, Evelyn, dearest, what's the good of compliments to a hungry man?"
+cried Scarlett. "I'm asking ye for bread--and ye give me the
+blarney-stone."
+
+Evelyn laughed, and, sitting, patted the place beside her, invitingly.
+"I'll tell you the whole story. It's like a romance--I was going to
+write you a letter about it if you had not come."
+
+"We'll write it together. We'll write it all our lives." Her lover
+slipped an arm about her. "But we'll start with the postscript."
+
+
+
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