A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE

BY

VICTORIA CROSS

NEW YORK

THE MACAULAY COMPANY

A Girl of the Klondike is now issued

in America for the first time by arrangement

with the author.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

A NIGHT IN TOWN

Night had fallen over Alaska—black, uncompromising night; a veil of impenetrable darkness had dropped upon the snow wastes and the ice-fields and the fettered Yukon, sleeping under its ice-chains, and upon the cruel passes where the trails had been made by tracks of blood. Day by day, as long as the light of day—God's glorious gift to man—had lasted, these trails across the passes, between the snowy peaks, the peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human cruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river through these passes, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, torture and suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placid azure of the summer heavens above had guided them, bands of men had laboured and fought and struggled over these passes, deaf to all pity or mercy or justice, deaf to all but the clamour of greed within them that was driving them on, trampling down the weak and the old, crushing the fallen, each man clutching and grasping his own, hoarding his strength and even refusing a hand to his neighbour, starving the patient beasts of burden they had brought with them, friends who were willing to share their toil without sharing their reward, driving on the poor staggering strengthless brutes with open knives, and clubbing them to death when they fell beneath their loads with piteous eyes, or leaving them to freeze slowly where they lay, pressing forward, hurrying, fighting, slaughtering, so the men went into the gold camps all the summer, and the passes were the silent witnesses of the horror of it all and of the innocent blood shed. Then Nature herself intervened, and winter came down like a black curtain on the world, and the passes closed up behind the men and were filled with drifts of snow that covered the bones and the blood and the deep miry slides, marked with slipping tracks where struggling, gasping lives had gone out, and the river closed up behind the men and the ice thickened there daily, and the men were in the camps and there was no way out.

And now, in the darkness of the winter night, in the coldness in which no man could live, there was peace. There was no sound, for the snow on the tall pines never melted and never fell, the water in the creeks was solid as the rocks and made no murmur, there was no footfall of bird nor beast, no leaf to rustle, no twig to fall.

But beyond the silent peaks and the desolate passes, beyond the rigid pines, low down in the darkness, there was a reddish glow in the air, a strange, yellowish, quivering mist of light that hovered and moved restlessly, and yet kept its place where it hung suspended between white earth and black sky. All around was majestic peace and calm and stillness, nature wrapped in silence, but the flickering, wavering mist of light jumped feverishly in the darkness and spoke of man. It was the cloud of restless light that hung over the city of Dawson.

Within the front parlour of the "Pistol Shot," the favourite and most successful, besides being the most appropriately named saloon in Dawson, the cold had been pretty well fought down; a huge stove stood at each end of the room, crammed as full as it would hold with fuel, all windows were tightly closed, and lamps flared merrily against the white-washed walls.

At this hour the room was full, and the single door, facing the bar, was pushed open every half minute to admit one or two or more figures to join the steaming, drinking, noisy crowd within. It was snowing outside. As the door swung open one could see the white sheet of falling flakes in the darkness; the air was full of snow—that cruel, light, dry snow, fine and sharp like powdered ice, borne down on a North wind. The figures that entered brought it in with them, the light frosty powder resting on their furs and lying deep in the upturned rims of their seal caps.

There had been a successful strike made that afternoon, and the men were all excited and eager about it. Every one pressed to the "Pistol Shot" to hear the latest details, to discuss and gossip over it. There was as much talk as digging done in Dawson. Men who had no chance and no means to win success, who owned no claims and never saw gold except in another man's hands, loved to talk work and talk claims and talk gold with the rest. It was exhilarating and exciting, and there was only that one topic in the world for them. They were like invalids in a small community afflicted by a common disease who never meet without discussing their symptoms. They were all invalids in reality, all suffering from the same horrible plague and fever, the gold fever that was eating into their brains.

At one end of the bar counter, between it and the back wall, a girl was standing idly surveying with indifferent eyes the animated crowd that moved and swayed round her, the men jostling each other in their efforts to push up to the thickly surrounded counter. She was tall rather than short, and her figure well made, showing good lines even in the rough dress she was wearing; long rubber boots came to her knees, where they met her short buckskin skirt, and above this, in place of bodice, she wore merely a rough straight jacket drawn into the waist by a broad leather belt, in which was stuck, not ostentatiously but still sufficiently conspicuously a brace of revolvers. Her hair