A Girl of the Klondike.

by Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER I

A NIGHT IN TOWN

Night had fallen over Alaska--black, uncompromising night; a veil of impenetrable darkness had dropped upon the snow wastes and the ice-fields and the fettered Yukon, sleeping under its ice-chains, and upon the cruel pa.s.ses where the trails had been made by tracks of blood.

Day by day, as long as the light of day--G.o.d's glorious gift to man--had lasted, these trails across the pa.s.ses, between the snowy peaks, the peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human cruelty, of human l.u.s.t and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river through these pa.s.ses, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, torture and suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placid azure of the summer heavens above had guided them, bands of men had laboured and fought and struggled over these pa.s.ses, deaf to all pity or mercy or justice, deaf to all but the clamour of greed within them that was driving them on, trampling down the weak and the old, crushing the fallen, each man clutching and grasping his own, h.o.a.rding his strength and even refusing a hand to his neighbour, starving the patient beasts of burden they had brought with them, friends who were willing to share their toil without sharing their reward, driving on the poor staggering strengthless brutes with open knives, and clubbing them to death when they fell beneath their loads with piteous eyes, or leaving them to freeze slowly where they lay, pressing forward, hurrying, fighting, slaughtering, so the men went into the gold camps all the summer, and the pa.s.ses were the silent witnesses of the horror of it all and of the innocent blood shed. Then Nature herself intervened, and winter came down like a black curtain on the world, and the pa.s.ses closed up behind the men and were filled with drifts of snow that covered the bones and the blood and the deep miry slides, marked with slipping tracks where struggling, gasping lives had gone out, and the river closed up behind the men and the ice thickened there daily, and the men were in the camps and there was no way out.

And now, in the darkness of the winter night, in the coldness in which no man could live, there was peace. There was no sound, for the snow on the tall pines never melted and never fell, the water in the creeks was solid as the rocks and made no murmur, there was no footfall of bird nor beast, no leaf to rustle, no twig to fall.

But beyond the silent peaks and the desolate pa.s.ses, beyond the rigid pines, low down in the darkness, there was a reddish glow in the air, a strange, yellowish, quivering mist of light that hovered and moved restlessly, and yet kept its place where it hung suspended between white earth and black sky. All around was majestic peace and calm and stillness, nature wrapped in silence, but the flickering, wavering mist of light jumped feverishly in the darkness and spoke of man. It was the cloud of restless light that hung over the city of Dawson.

Within the front parlour of the "Pistol Shot," the favourite and most successful, besides being the most appropriately named saloon in Dawson, the cold had been pretty well fought down; a huge stove stood at each end of the room, crammed as full as it would hold with fuel, all windows were tightly closed, and lamps flared merrily against the white-washed walls.

At this hour the room was full, and the single door, facing the bar, was pushed open every half minute to admit one or two or more figures to join the steaming, drinking, noisy crowd within. It was snowing outside.

As the door swung open one could see the white sheet of falling flakes in the darkness; the air was full of snow--that cruel, light, dry snow, fine and sharp like powdered ice, borne down on a North wind. The figures that entered brought it in with them, the light frosty powder resting on their furs and lying deep in the upturned rims of their seal caps.

There had been a successful strike made that afternoon, and the men were all excited and eager about it. Every one pressed to the "Pistol Shot"

to hear the latest details, to discuss and gossip over it. There was as much talk as digging done in Dawson. Men who had no chance and no means to win success, who owned no claims and never saw gold except in another man's hands, loved to talk work and talk claims and talk gold with the rest. It was exhilarating and exciting, and there was only that one topic in the world for them. They were like invalids in a small community afflicted by a common disease who never meet without discussing their symptoms. They were all invalids in reality, all suffering from the same horrible plague and fever, the gold fever that was eating into their brains.

At one end of the bar counter, between it and the back wall, a girl was standing idly surveying with indifferent eyes the animated crowd that moved and swayed round her, the men jostling each other in their efforts to push up to the thickly surrounded counter. She was tall rather than short, and her figure well made, showing good lines even in the rough dress she was wearing; long rubber boots came to her knees, where they met her short buckskin skirt, and above this, in place of bodice, she wore merely a rough straight jacket drawn into the waist by a broad leather belt, in which was stuck, not ostentatiously but still sufficiently conspicuously a brace of revolvers. Her hair was cut short, and only a few dark silky rings showed themselves beneath the edge of her sealskin cap, pushed down close to her dark eyebrows. The dark eyes beneath looked out upon the scene before her with a half-disdainful, half-wearied expression which deepened into scorn now and then as she watched the bar-tender rake over the counter double and three times the price of a drink in the generous pinch of gold dust laid there by some miner almost too drunk to stagger to the bar. She had a very attractive face, to which one's eyes would wander again and again trying to reconcile the peculiar resolution, even hardness of the expression with the soft, well-moulded features and the sweet youthful lips full of freshness and colour. The miners took very little notice of her, and she certainly made no effort to attract it, leaning listlessly against the bar with one elbow on the counter, a silent and motionless spectator of all this excited eager humanity. There was no thought in their mind, no word on their lips just then but gold. Gold! gold! The thought possessed them with a grip on their brains like the grip of fever on the body, and the word sounded pleasant as the sweetest music to their ears. Gold! The syllable went round and pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, till the very air seemed to be getting a yellow tint above the grey fumes of tobacco.

Amongst the last batch of incomers was a slim young fellow of twenty odd years, and when he had worked his way with difficulty up to the crowded counter, he found himself near the girl's corner. She looked at him, letting her dark eyes wander critically over his face. He formed a strong contrast to the figures around him, being slight and delicate in build, with a pale good-looking face that had a tender sympathetic expression like a woman's. Feeling the girl's gaze upon him, he glanced her way, and then having looked once, looked again. After a series of glances between drinks from his gla.s.s, the furtive looks began to amuse the girl, and the next time their eyes met she laughed openly, and they both spoke simultaneously.

"You're a new comer, aren't you?" she said.

"I haven't seen you here before," was his remark.

"You might have done, I should think," answered the girl carelessly; "but I don't come here very often, although my father is running this place."

"Are you Poniatovsky's daughter?" he asked in surprise, unable to connect this splendid young creature with the ugly little Pole he knew as the proprietor of the saloon.

The girl nodded. "Yes, Katrine Poniatovsky is my name--what's yours?"

"Stephen Wood," he answered meekly.

"What have you come here for--mining?" she asked next. Although her queries were direct there was nothing rude in the fresh young voice making them.

The young fellow coloured deeply, the rush of blood pa.s.sed over his face up to his light smooth hair and deep down into his neck till it was lost beneath his coat collar.

"No--yes--that is--well, I mean--I do mine now," he stammered after a minute.

The girl said nothing, and when Stephen glanced around at her he saw she was regarding him with astonished eyes under elevated eyebrows. This expression made the pretty oval face fairly beautiful, and the young man's heart opened to her.

"I came with the intention of doing some good here amongst the people--in a missionary, religious way I mean, but"--and he stopped again in painful embarra.s.sment.

Katrine laughed.

"For the present you've laid religion aside and you're going to do a little mining and make a fortune, and then the religion can be taken up again," she said.

The young fellow only flushed deeper and turned his gla.s.s around nervously on the counter.

"That's all right," the girl said soothingly, after a second. "This place is a corner of the world where we all are different from what we are anywhere else. As soon as men come here they get changed. They forget everything else and just go in for gold. It's a sort of madness that's in the air. You'd be able to missionise somewhere else all right, but here you are obliged just to dig like the rest, you can't help it.

Got a claim?"

The young man's face paled again.

"Yes," he answered in a low tone. "It was the claim that tempted me.

It's one of the best, I believe, over in the west gulch, only about ten miles from here."

There was a pressing movement round them as some fresh miners came pushing their way through to the bar, and Stephen and Katrine moved away, to make room for them, towards the wall of the room; they put their backs against it and looked over the ma.s.s of moving heads towards the door.

"Look at this fellow coming in now," Stephen said to his companion suddenly, as the door swung open, to a mist of whirling whiteness, and two or three men entered: "Henry Talbot. He has the claim next mine in the gulch. He has just struck a fresh lot of gold, and he'll soon be one of the richest men here."

The girl craned her neck to get a good view between the intervening heads, and though she had not been told which of the incoming figures to look at, she fixed her eyes as if by instinct on the right one. A man of rather tall, slight figure, pale face, and marked features. He made his way towards the bar, and then catching Stephen's signals to him, he smiled and came their way.

"What are you doing down here?" he said, speaking to Stephen but looking at Katrine, who in her turn was scanning his face closely.

"Why, enjoying Miss Poniatovsky's society," answered Stephen, with a bow. His friend bowed too, and then they all three laughed and felt instinctively they were friends. There is nothing truer than the saying, "Good looks are perpetual letters of introduction." These three carried their letters of introduction on their faces, and they were all mutually satisfied.

"I know your father quite well," remarked Talbot to her. "This 'Pistol Shot' has been an inst.i.tution longer than I have been here, but I never knew he had a daughter."

"No," said Katrine, tranquilly, "I daresay not. Father and I quarrelled a little while ago, and since then I have been living by myself in one of those little cabins in Good Luck Row. Do you know it?"

"No," answered Talbot. "I come into town very seldom, only when I want fresh supplies. I stay up at the claim nearly all the time. Do you live all by yourself then?" he added, wondering to himself as he looked at her, for her beauty was quite striking, and she was certainly not over twenty, yet there was something in the strong, n.o.ble outlines of her figure, in the tranquil calm of her manner, the self-reliance of her whole bearing, and the business-like way those pistols were thrust in her belt, that modified the wonder a little.

"Quite," she said, with a laugh. "Oh, I've always been accustomed to take care of myself."

"But don't you feel very dull and lonely?"

"Sometimes," answered the girl; "but then I would much rather live alone than with some one I can't agree with."

Both the men knew the drunken habits of old Poniatovsky, so that they silently sympathised with her, and there was a pause as they watched other miners coming in.

"Well," said Katrine after a few seconds, straightening herself from her leaning att.i.tude, "I think I will go home now; this place is getting so full, we shan't be able to breathe soon."

The men looked at each other, and then spoke simultaneously: "May we see you as far as your cabin?"

Katrine smiled, such a pretty arch smile, that dimpled the velvet cheeks and illumined the whole face.

"Why yes, do, I shall be delighted."

They all three went out together: the cold outside seemed so deadly that Talbot drew his collar up over his mouth and nose, unable to face it; the girl, however, did not seem to notice it, but laughed and chatted gaily in the teeth of the wind, as they made their way down the street.

It was still snowing--a peculiar fine powdery snow, light and almost imperceptible, filled the whole air. Katrine walked fast with springing steps down the side-walk, and the two men plunged along beside her. Such a side-walk it was: in the summer a mere ma.s.s of mud and melted snow and acc.u.mulated rubbish--for in Dawson the inhabitants will not take the trouble to convey their refuse to any definite spot, but simply throw it out from their cabins a few yards from their own door, with a vague notion that they may have moved elsewhere before it rots badly,--now frozen solid but horribly uneven, and worn into deep holes. On the top of this had been laid some narrow planks, covered now by a thick glaze of ice, which rendered them things to be avoided and a line of danger down the middle of the path. Katrine made nothing of these slight inconveniences of the ground, but went swinging on in her large rubber boots, and talking and jesting all the way. At the bottom of the street, at the corner, there was a large wooden building, a double log-cabin turned into a saloon. Lights were fixed outside in tin shades, and the word "Dancing" was painted in white letters on the lintel. Katrine stopped suddenly.