“Someboady tak de corner dat blanket an’ blow may nose.”

Then we heard voices outside.

“Hello, in there.”

Annie stood up, clutching at her throat, and stepped behind the corner of the bunks as the door opened, framing the prettiest picture this old range rider ever saw.

’Twas a girl, glowing pink and red where the cold had kissed her cheeks, with yellow curlicues of hair wandering out under her yarn cap.  Her little fox-trimmed parka quit at the knees, showing the daintiest pair of—­I can’t say it.  Anyhow, they wasn’t, they just looked like ’em, only nicer.

She stood blinking at us, coming from the bright light outside, as cute as a new faro box—­then: 

“Can you tell me where Mrs. Bradshaw lives?  She’s somewhere in this district.  I’m her daughter—­come all the way from the States to see her.”

When she smiled I could hear the heart-strings of those ragged, whiskered, frost-bit “mushers” bustin’ like banjo strings.

“You know her, don’t you?” she says, turning to me.

“Know her, Miss?  Well, I should snort!  There ain’t a prospector on the range that ain’t proud and honoured to call her a friend.  Leastways, if there is I’ll bust his block,” and I cast the bad eye on the boys to wise ’em up.

“Ain’t I right, Joe?”

“Betcher dam life,” says Joe, sort of over-stepping the conventions.

“Then tell me where her claim is.  It’s quite rich, and you must know it,” says she, appealing to him.

Up against it?  Say!  I seen the whites of his eyes show like he was drownding, and he grinned joyful as a man kicked in the stummick.

“Er—­er—­I just bought in here, and ain’t acquainted much,” says he.  “Have a drink,” and, in his confusions, he sets out the bottle of alkalies that he dignifies by the alias of booze.  Then he continues with reg’lar human intelligence.

“Bill, here, he can tell you where the ground is,” and the whelp indicates me.

Lord knows my finish, but for Ole Lund.  He sits up in his bunk, swaddled in Annie Black’s bandages, and through slits between his frost bites, he moults the follering rhetoric: 

“Aye tole you vere de claim iss.  She own de Nomber Twenty fraction on Buster Creek, ’longside may and may broder.  She’s dam good fraction, too.”

I consider that a blamed white stunt for Swedes; paying for their lives with the mine they swindled her out of.

Anyhow, it knocked us galley-west.

I’d formulated a swell climax, involving the discovery of the mother, when the mail man spoke up, him that had been her particular abomination, a queer kind of a break in his voice: 

“Come out of that.”

Mrs. Bradshaw moved out into the light, and, if I’m any judge, the joy that showed in her face rubbed away the bitterness of the past years.  With an aching little cry the girl ran to her, and hid in her arms like a quail.