When Uri, mastering the flesh and struggling to his feet, beckoned for the weapon, Fortune was minded to fire again.  But he thrust the idea from him.  Chance had been very good to him already, he felt, and if he tricked now he would have to pay for it afterward.  No, he would play fair.  Besides Uri was hard hit and could not possibly hold the heavy Colt long enough to draw a bead.

“And where is your God now?” he taunted, as he gave the wounded man the revolver.

And Uri answered:  “God has not yet spoken.  Prepare that He may speak.”

Fortune faced him, but twisted his chest sideways in order to present less surface.  Uri tottered about drunkenly, but waited, too, for the moment’s calm between the catspaws.  The revolver was very heavy, and he doubted, like Fortune, because of its weight.  But he held it, arm extended, above his head, and then let it slowly drop forward and down.  At the instant Fortune’s left breast and the sight flashed into line with his eye, he pulled the trigger.  Fortune did not whirl, but gay San Francisco dimmed and faded, and as the sun-bright snow turned black and blacker, he breathed his last malediction on the Chance he had misplayed.

SIWASH

“If I was a man—­” Her words were in themselves indecisive, but the withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not lost upon the men-folk in the tent.

Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick Humphries, Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon capitalist, beamed upon her benevolently as ever.  He bore women too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said, when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would not permit them to see all around a thing.  So they said nothing, these two men who had taken the half-frozen woman into their tent three days back, and who had warmed her, and fed her, and rescued her goods from the Indian packers.  This latter had necessitated the payment of numerous dollars, to say nothing of a demonstration in force—­Dick Humphries squinting along the sights of a Winchester while Tommy apportioned their wages among them at his own appraisement.  It had been a little thing in itself, but it meant much to a woman playing a desperate single-hand in the equally desperate Klondike rush of ’97.  Men were occupied with their own pressing needs, nor did they approve of women playing, single-handed, the odds of the arctic winter.  “If I was a man, I know what I would do.”  Thus reiterated Molly, she of the flashing eyes, and therein spoke the cumulative grit of five American-born generations.

In the succeeding silence, Tommy thrust a pan of biscuits into the Yukon stove and piled on fresh fuel.  A reddish flood pounded along under his sun-tanned skin, and as he stooped, the skin of his neck was scarlet.  Dick palmed a three-cornered sail needle through a set of broken pack straps, his good nature in nowise disturbed by the feminine cataclysm which was threatening to burst in the storm-beaten tent.