The veins swelled on his forehead, and there was a smouldering fire in his eyes, while the girl suspected he was alluding to some especial member of the class, and noticed that his eye seemed to follow the smoke of the Tyee.  Then he laughed.

“I guess I’m talking nonsense again, but there’s a little behind it, and I feel that you can pick it out,” he said.  “Now I’m not good at amusing women, but you and Mrs. Jimmy seem to understand me.”

“Who is Mrs. Jimmy, and does her husband belong to Somasco?” asked the girl, with a smile.

Alton laid down the paddle, and took off his hat.  “Jimmy,” he said solemnly, “is dead.  He was my partner, and his wife is a friend of mine.  She was in some ways very like you.”

“They had a ranch up here?” said Miss Deringham languidly.

“No,” said Alton.  “It wasn’t often they had ten dollars.  She was a lady bar-keep down in Vancouver before she married Jimmy.  He was a trail-chopper in this country.  I don’t know what he was in the old one.”

“And,” said Miss Deringham, “Mrs. Jimmy resembles me?”

She regretted it next moment when she saw Alton’s face.  It expressed subdued surprise, and the girl felt irritated with herself.

“Yes,” he said gravely.  “Human nature’s much the same at the bottom, whether it has gold on the top of it or the dints of the hammer, and Mrs. Jimmy was good all through.”

“That,” said Miss Deringham, “is distinctly pretty.”

“Well,” said Alton smiling, “I didn’t mean it that way.  Work was scarce in the province, and I’d lost my cattle when Jimmy went up with me into the ranges to look for silver.  He brought his wife along, because he had no dollars or anywhere to leave her, and it was a mighty tough place for a woman where we camped under the big glacier.  We stayed right there most of the winter.  There was only frost and snow, and the wind that whirled it about the pines, and, until it froze up, we lived a good deal on salmon from the river.  They were dead when we got them, and some of them rotten.”

Miss Deringham shivered.  “And when the river froze?” she said.

“Then,” said Alton gravely, “there were days when we lived on nothing, and worked until we couldn’t hold the pick to keep from thinking.  Still, we got a deer now and then, and we had a very little flour.  It was mouldy when we bought it, but we hadn’t dollars enough for anything better.  Mrs. Jimmy got sick and thin, but she never grumbled, and was always waiting bright and smiling when we crawled back into the shanty.  Anyway, we found no silver that would pay for the getting, though we knew it was there.”

“How did you know that?” said Miss Deringham.

“Well,” said Alton, “a Siwash told us something.  He crawled in starving one day, and though we hadn’t much over we fed him.  For another thing we felt it in us that we were on the right trail.”