“I kissed her, and she dozed off, whispering, ‘It is good.’  At the end, that near gone my ear was at her lips, she roused for the last time.  ‘Remember, Tommy; remember my feather bed.’  Then she died, in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station.”

The tent heeled over and half flattened before the gale.  Dick refilled his pipe, while Tommy drew the tea and set it aside against Molly’s return.

And she of the flashing eyes and Yankee blood?  Blinded, falling, crawling on hand and knee, the wind thrust back in her throat by the wind, she was heading for the tent.  On her shoulders a bulky pack caught the full fury of the storm.  She plucked feebly at the knotted flaps, but it was Tommy and Dick who cast them loose.  Then she set her soul for the last effort, staggered in, and fell exhausted on the floor.

Tommy unbuckled the straps and took the pack from her.  As he lifted it there was a clanging of pots and pans.  Dick, pouring out a mug of whiskey, paused long enough to pass the wink across her body.  Tommy winked back.  His lips pursed the monosyllable, “clothes,” but Dick shook his head reprovingly.  “Here, little woman,” he said, after she had drunk the whiskey and straightened up a bit.

“Here’s some dry togs.  Climb into them.  We’re going out to extra-peg the tent.  After that, give us the call, and we’ll come in and have dinner.  Sing out when you’re ready.”

“So help me, Dick, that’s knocked the edge off her for the rest of this trip,” Tommy spluttered as they crouched to the lee of the tent.

“But it’s the edge is her saving grace.”  Dick replied, ducking his head to a volley of sleet that drove around a corner of the canvas.  “The edge that you and I’ve got, Tommy, and the edge of our mothers before us.”

THE MAN WITH THE GASH

Jacob Kent had suffered from cupidity all the days of his life.  This, in turn, had engendered a chronic distrustfulness, and his mind and character had become so warped that he was a very disagreeable man to deal with.  He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very set in his ideas.  He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his loom.  His cabin stood midway between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart River; and men who made it a custom to travel the trail to Dawson, likened him to a robber baron, perched in his fortress and exacting toll from the caravans that used his ill-kept roads.  Since a certain amount of history was required in the construction of this figure, the less cultured wayfarers from Stuart River were prone to describe him after a still more primordial fashion, in which a command of strong adjectives was to be chiefly noted.