“Where do you want to go?” they asked Miss Chester.

There was no longer in Glenister’s glance that freedom with which he had come to regard the women of the North.  He had come to realize dully that here was a girl driven by some strong purpose into a position repellent to her.  In a man of his type, her independence awoke only admiration and her coldness served but to inflame him the more.  Delicacy, in Glenister, was lost in a remarkable singleness of purpose.  He could laugh at her loathing, smile under her abuse, and remain utterly ignorant that anything more than his action in seizing her that night lay at the bottom of her dislike.  He did not dream that he possessed characteristics abhorrent to her; and he felt a keen reluctance at parting.

She extended both hands.

“I can never thank you enough for what you have done—­you two; but I shall try.  Good-bye!”

Dextry gazed doubtfully at his own hand, rough and gnarly, then taking hers as he would have handled a robin’s egg, waggled it limply.

“We ain’t goin’ to turn you adrift this-a-way.  Whatever your destination is, we’ll see you to it.”

“I can find my friends,” she assured him.

“This is the wrong latitude in which to dispute a lady, but knowin’ this camp from soup to nuts, as I do, I su’gests a male escort.”

“Very well!  I wish to find Mr. Struve, of Dunham & Struve, lawyers.”

“I’ll take you to their offices,” said Glenister.  “You see to the baggage, Dex.  Meet me at the Second Class in half an hour and we’ll run out to the Midas.”  They pushed through the tangle of tents, past piles of lumber, and emerged upon the main thoroughfare, which ran parallel to the shore.

Nome consisted of one narrow street, twisted between solid rows of canvas and half-erected frame buildings, its every other door that of a saloon.  There were fair-looking blocks which aspired to the dizzy height of three stories, some sheathed in corrugated iron, others gleaming and galvanized.  Lawyers’ signs, doctors’, surveyors’, were in the upper windows.  The street was thronged with men from every land—­Helen Chester heard more dialects than she could count.  Laplanders in quaint, three-cornered, padded caps idled past.  Men with the tan of the tropics rubbed elbows with yellow-haired Norsemen, and near her a carefully groomed Frenchman with riding-breeches and monocle was in pantomime with a skin-clad Eskimo.  To her left was the sparkling sea, alive with ships of every class.  To her right towered timberless mountains, unpeopled, unexplored, forbidding, and desolate—­their hollows inlaid with snow.  On one hand were the life and the world she knew; on the other, silence, mystery, possible adventure.

The roadway where she stood was a crush of sundry vehicles from bicycles to dog-hauled water-carts, and on all sides men were laboring busily, the echo of hammers mingling with the cries of teamsters and the tinkle of music within the saloons.