Ain’t ever seen her?  Lord!  I thought everybody knew Annie Black.  She drifted into camp one day, tall, slab-sided, ornery to the view, and raising fifty or upwards; disposition uncertain as frozen dynamite.  Her ground plans and elevations looked like she was laid out for a man, but the specifications hadn’t been follered.  We ain’t consumed by curiosity regarding the etymology of every stranger that drifts in, and as long as he totes his own pack, does his assessments, and writes his location notices proper, it goes.  Leastways, it went till she hit town.  In a month she had the brotherly love of that camp gritting its teeth and throwing back twisters.  ’Twas all legitimate, too, and there never was a pennyweight of scandal connected with her name.  No, sir!  Far’s conduct goes, she’s always been the shinin’ female example of this country; but them qualities let her out.

First move was to jump Bat Ruggles’s town lot.  He had four courses of logs laid for a cabin when “Scotty” Bell came in from the hills with $1800 in coarse gold that he’d rocked out of a prospect shaft on Bat’s Moose’s Creek claim.

Naturally Bat made general proclamation of thirst, and our town kinder dozed violently into a joyful three days’ reverie, during which period of coma the recording time on Bat’s lot ran out.

He returns from his “hootch-hunt” to complete the shack, and finds Annie overseeing some “Siwashes” put a pole roof on it.  Of course he promotes a race-war immediate, playing the white “open” and the red to lose, so to speak, when she up an’ spanks his face, addressing expurgated, motherly cuss-words at him like he’d been a bad boy and swallered his spoon, or dug an eye out of the kitten.  Bat realizes he’s against a strange system and draws out of the game.

A week later she jumps No. 3, Gold Bottom, because Donnelly stuck a pick in his foot and couldn’t stay to finish the assessment.

“I can’t throw her off, or shoot her up,” says he, “or even cuss at her like I want to, ’cause she’s a lady.”  And it appeared like that’d been her graft ever since—­presumin’ on her sex to make disturbances.  In six months we hated her like pizen.

There wasn’t a stampede in a hundred miles where her bloomers wasn’t leading, for she had the endurance of a moose; and between excitements she prospected for trouble in the manner of relocations.

I’ve heard of fellers speakin’ disrespectful to her and then wandering around dazed and loco after she’d got through painting word pictures of ’em.  It goes without saying she was generally popular and petted, and when the Commissioner invited her to duck out down the river, the community sighed, turned over, and had a peaceful rest—­first one since she’d come in.

I hadn’t seen her from that time till I blowed into Slisco’s on the bosom of this forty mile, forty below blizzard.