“Now, honestly,” Lon said, with one of his lightning changes, “you’ve seen her, what do you think of her—­of her looks, I mean?  How does she strike your beauty sense?”

“She is remarkably beautiful,” I said.  “I never saw anything like her in my life.  In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I could not keep my eyes off of her.  It wasn’t curiosity.  It was wonder, sheer wonder, she was so strangely beautiful.”

“She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her,” Lon said softly.  “She was truly the Flush of Cold.  She turned all men’s hearts . . . and heads.  She recalls, with an effort, that I once won a canoe race at Dawson—­I, who once loved her, and was told by her of her love for me.  It was her beauty that made all men love her.  She’d ‘a’ got the apple from Paris, on application, and there wouldn’t have been any Trojan War, and to top it off she’d have thrown Paris down.  And now she lives in darkness, and she who was always fickle, for the first time is constant—­and constant to a shade, to a dead man she does not realize is dead.

“And this is the way it was.  You remember what I said last night of Dave Walsh—­Big Dave Walsh?  He was all that I said, and more, many times more.  He came into this country in the late eighties—­that’s a pioneer for you.  He was twenty years old then.  He was a young bull.  When he was twenty-five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty-pound sacks of flour.  At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out.  It was a lone land in those days.  No river steamboats, no grub, nothing but salmon bellies and rabbit tracks.  But after famine chased him out three years, he said he’d had enough of being chased; and the next year he stayed.  He lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it; he ate eleven dogs that winter; but he stayed.  And the next winter he stayed, and the next.  He never did leave the country again.  He was a bull, a great bull.  He could kill the strongest man in the country with hard work.  He could outpack a Chilcat Indian, he could outpaddle a Stick, and he could travel all day with wet feet when the thermometer registered fifty below zero, and that’s going some, I tell you, for vitality.  You’d freeze your feet at twenty-five below if you wet them and tried to keep on.

“Dave Walsh was a bull for strength.  And yet he was soft and easy-natured.  Anybody could do him, the latest short-horn in camp could lie his last dollar out of him.  ‘But it doesn’t worry me,’ he had a way of laughing off his softness; ‘it doesn’t keep me awake nights.’  Now don’t get the idea that he had no backbone.  You remember about the bear he went after with the popgun.  When it came to fighting Dave was the blamedest ever.  He was the limit, if by that I may describe his unlimitedness when he got into action, he was easy and kind with the weak, but the strong had to give trail when he went by.  And he was a man that men liked, which is the finest word of all, a man’s man.