“There’s my clothes,” she half-whimpered, the feminine for the moment prevailing.  “They’re right at the top of the cache, and they’ll be ruined!  I tell you, ruined!”

“There, there,” Dick interposed, when the last quavering syllable had wailed itself out.  “Don’t let that worry you, little woman.  I’m old enough to be your father’s brother, and I’ve a daughter older than you, and I’ll tog you out in fripperies when we get to Dawson if it takes my last dollar.”

“When we get to Dawson!” The scorn had come back to her throat with a sudden surge.  “You’ll rot on the way, first.  You’ll drown in a mudhole.  You—­you—­Britishers!”

The last word, explosive, intensive, had strained the limits of her vituperation.  If that would not stir these men, what could?  Tommy’s neck ran red again, but he kept his tongue between his teeth.  Dick’s eyes mellowed.  He had the advantage over Tommy, for he had once had a white woman for a wife.

The blood of five American-born generations is, under certain circumstances, an uncomfortable heritage; and among these circumstances might be enumerated that of being quartered with next of kin.  These men were Britons.  On sea and land her ancestry and the generations thereof had thrashed them and theirs.  On sea and land they would continue to do so.  The traditions of her race clamored for vindication.  She was but a woman of the present, but in her bubbled the whole mighty past.  It was not alone Molly Travis who pulled on gum boots, mackintosh, and straps; for the phantom hands of ten thousand forbears drew tight the buckles, just so as they squared her jaw and set her eyes with determination.  She, Molly Travis, intended to shame these Britishers; they, the innumerable shades, were asserting the dominance of the common race.

The men-folk did not interfere.  Once Dick suggested that she take his oilskins, as her mackintosh was worth no more than paper in such a storm.  But she sniffed her independence so sharply that he communed with his pipe till she tied the flaps on the outside and slushed away on the flooded trail.

“Think she’ll make it?” Dick’s face belied the indifference of his voice.

“Make it?  If she stands the pressure till she gets to the cache, what of the cold and misery, she’ll be stark, raving mad.  Stand it?  She’ll be dumb-crazed.  You know it yourself, Dick.  You’ve wind-jammed round the Horn.  You know what it is to lay out on a topsail yard in the thick of it, bucking sleet and snow and frozen canvas till you’re ready to just let go and cry like a baby.  Clothes?  She won’t be able to tell a bundle of skirts from a gold pan or a tea-kettle.”

“Kind of think we were wrong in letting her go, then?”

“Not a bit of it.  So help me, Dick, she’d ‘a’ made this tent a hell for the rest of the trip if we hadn’t.  Trouble with her she’s got too much spirit.  This’ll tone it down a bit.”