Maudie had put her letters unopened in her pocket, and told the man at the scales to weigh out two dollars to Windy, and charge to her.  Then she began to talk to the Colonel.

The Boy observed with scant patience that his pardner treated Maudie with a consideration he could hardly have bettered had she been the first lady in the land.  “Must be because she’s little and cute-lookin’.  The Colonel’s a sentimental ol’ goslin’.”

“What makes you so polite to that dance-hall girl?” muttered the Boy aside.  “She’s no good.”

“Reckon it won’t make her any better for me to be impolite to her,” returned the Colonel calmly.

But finding she could not detach the Kentuckian from his pardner, Maudie bestowed her attention elsewhere.  French Charlie was leaning back against the wall, his hands jammed in his pockets, and his big slouch-hat pulled over his brows.  Under the shadow of the wide brim furtively he watched the girl.  Another woman came up and asked him to dance.  He shook his head.

“Reckon we’d better go and knock up Blandford Keith and get a bed,” suggested the Boy regretfully, looking round for the man who had a cinch up on Glory Hallelujah, and wouldn’t tell you how to get there.

“Reckon we’d better,” agreed the Colonel.

But they halted near Windy Jim, who was refreshing himself, and at the same time telling Dawson news, or Dawson lies, as the company evidently thought.  And still the men crowded round, listening greedily, just as everybody devours certain public prints without ceasing to impeach their veracity.  Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that gentleman had ever told.  For Windy, with the story-teller’s instinct, knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision boats at Circle, and starvation stared the over-populated Klondyke in the face.

Having disposed of their letters, the miners crowded round the courier to hear how the black business ended—­matter of special interest to Minook, for the population here was composed chiefly of men who, by the Canadian route, had managed to get to Dawson in the autumn, in the early days of the famine scare, and who, after someone’s panic-proposal to raid the great Stores, were given free passage down the river on the last two steamers to run.

When the ice stopped them (one party at Circle, the other at Fort Yukon), they had held up the supply boats and helped themselves under the noses of Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson, U. S. A.

“Yes, sir,” McGinty had explained, “we Minook boys was all in that picnic.  But we give our bond to pay up at mid-summer, and after the fun was over we dropped down here.”

He pushed nearer to Windy to hear how it had fared with the men who had stayed behind in the Klondyke—­how the excitement flamed and menaced; how Agent Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, greatest of the importers of provisions and Arctic equipment, rushed about, half crazy, making speeches all along the Dawson River front, urging the men to fly for their lives, back to the States or up to Circle, before the ice stopped moving!