“And I took you for a tenderfoot, a chechaquo,” Frona said meekly, as St. Vincent tied his ear-flaps and turned up his collar preparatory to leaving.

“I dislike posing,” he answered, matching her meekness.  “It smacks of insincerity; it really is untrue.  And it is so easy to slip into it.  Look at the old-timers,—­’sour-doughs’ as they proudly call themselves.  Just because they have been in the country a few years, they let themselves grow wild and woolly and glorify in it.  They may not know it, but it is a pose.  In so far as they cultivate salient peculiarities, they cultivate falseness to themselves and live lies.”

“I hardly think you are wholly just,” Frona said, in defence of her chosen heroes.  “I do like what you say about the matter in general, and I detest posing, but the majority of the old-timers would be peculiar in any country, under any circumstances.  That peculiarity is their own; it is their mode of expression.  And it is, I am sure, just what makes them go into new countries.  The normal man, of course, stays at home.”

“Oh, I quite agree with you, Miss Welse,” he temporized easily.  “I did not intend it so sweepingly.  I meant to brand that sprinkling among them who are poseurs.  In the main, as you say, they are honest, and sincere, and natural.”

“Then we have no quarrel.  But Mr. St. Vincent, before you go, would you care to come to-morrow evening?  We are getting up theatricals for Christmas.  I know you can help us greatly, and I think it will not be altogether unenjoyable to you.  All the younger people are interested,—­the officials, officers of police, mining engineers, gentlemen rovers, and so forth, to say nothing of the nice women.  You are bound to like them.”

“I am sure I shall,” as he took her hand.  “Tomorrow, did you say?”

“To-morrow evening.  Good-night.”

A brave man, she told herself as she went bade from the door, and a splendid type of the race.

CHAPTER XIII

Gregory St. Vincent swiftly became an important factor in the social life of Dawson.  As a representative of the Amalgamated Press Association, he had brought with him the best credentials a powerful influence could obtain, and over and beyond, he was well qualified socially by his letters of introduction.  It developed in a quiet way that he was a wanderer and explorer of no small parts, and that he had seen life and strife pretty well all over the earth’s crust.  And withal, he was so mild and modest about it, that nobody, not even among the men, was irritated by his achievements.  Incidentally, he ran across numerous old acquaintances.  Jacob Welse he had met at St. Michael’s in the fall of ’88, just prior to his crossing Bering Straits on the ice.  A month or so later, Father Barnum (who had come up from the Lower River to take charge of the hospital) had met him a couple of hundred miles on his way north of St. Michael’s.  Captain Alexander, of the Police, had rubbed shoulders with him in the British Legation at Peking.  And Bettles, another old-timer of standing, had met him at Fort o’ Yukon nine years before.