“What name?  What name, Dutch?  What name?” She shook him like a rat.

“Bradshaw—­but you needn’t run your nails through and clinch ’em.  Ow!  Le’go my white meat.  You act like she was your long lost baby.  What d’ye think of that idea, fellers?  Ain’t that a pleasin’ conceit?  Annie Black, and a baby.  Ha!  Ha! that’s a hit.  Annie and a daughter.  A cow-thief and a calla-lily.”

“Dutch,” says I, “you ain’t a-goin’ to make it through to Lane’s Landing if you don’t pull your freight,” and I drags the darn fool out and starts him off.

When I came in she was huddled onto a goods box, shaking and sobbing like any woman, while the boys sat around and champed their bits and stomped.

“Take me away, Billy,” she says.  “For God’s sake take me away before she sees me.”  She slid down to the floor and cried something awful.  Gents, that was sure the real distress, nothing soft and sloppy, but hard, wrenchy, deep ones, like you hear at a melodrayma.  ’Twas only back in ’99 that I seen an awful crying match, though both of the ladies had been drinking, so I felt like I was useder to emotion than the balance of the boys, and it was up to me to take a holt.

“Madam,” says I, and somehow the word didn’t seem out of place any more—­“Madam, why do you want to avoid this party?”

“Take me away,” she says.  “It’s my daughter.  She’s going to find me this way, all rough and immodest and made fun of.  But that’s the worst you can say, isn’t it?  I’m a square woman—­you know I am, don’t you, boys?” and she looked at us fierce and pleadin’.

“Sure,” says Joe.  “We’ll boost you with the girl all right.”

“She thinks her father’s dead, but he isn’t—­he ran away with a show woman—­a year after we were married.  I never told her about it, and I’ve tried to make a little lady of her.”

We found out afterwards that she had put the girl in a boarding-school, but couldn’t seem to make enough for both of them, and when the Klondyke was struck thought she saw a chance.  She came north, insulted by deck hands and laughed at by the officers.  At Skagway she nursed a man through typhoid, and when he could walk he robbed her.  The mounted police took everything else she had and mocked at her.  “Your kind always has money,” they said.

That’s how it had been everywhere, and that’s why she was so hard and bitter.  She’d worked and fought like a man, but she’d suffered like a woman.

“I’ve lied and starved and stolen for her,” said Annie, “to make her think I was doing well.  She said she was coming in to me, but I knew winter would catch her at Dawson, and I thought I could head her off by spring.”

“Now, she’s here; but, men, as your mothers loved you, save me from my little girl.”

She buried her face, and when I looked at the boys, tears stood in Joe Slisco’s eyes and the others breathed hard.  Ole Lund, him that was froze worst about the hands, spoke up: