"What do you mean?" asked Katrine, looking up apprehensively. "Blood?"

The other nodded in silence, and there was quiet in the cabin except for the crooning of the child. Then Katrine rose from the hearth impulsively with a flushed, lovely face and the ash dust on her hair and dress. She went over to Annie and drew her head on to her strong, warm bosom.

"Oh, you poor, poor thing! What can we do?" she said desperately.

"Nothing," murmured Annie, closing her eyes in the girl's soothing embrace, "unless you could persuade Will to take me home, and n.o.body could do that now, he's so set upon the gold. That's the second bleeding from the chest that I've had this month; now the third'll do for me."

She shivered as if from cold, and Katrine kissed her and hastened back to her work at the fire. It is not a pleasant nor an easy thing to do to clean out a stove that has been left to itself for a week or more and fresh fires kindled on the old ashes every day, but in a few minutes Katrine had the work completed and the fresh wood crackling and filling the stove with red flame. Then she made the tea rapidly, and neither of them spoke again till Annie held a great tin mug of it to her white lips. Katrine pulled her chair close to the stove again, and took Tim on her own lap, where he found a new toy in her cartridge belt. Annie sipped from her mug and gazed absently into the flames.

"Lord, we were so happy," she said musingly, a little colour coming into her face under the influence of the hot tea and the warmth from the re-invigorated fire. "We had the nicest little home down in Brixham. I daresay you don't know where that is?" Katrine shook her head. "It's just the prettiest, sweetest village in the world, down in Devonshire; and we had a cottage there, quite in the country, with pink roses all over the front,--I can smell those roses now. Oh, it was lovely; and Will had regular work all the time, and he was the best husband woman ever had. He used to bring his wages in Sat.u.r.days, and say to me, 'Annie, old girl, ain't there enough there to get you a new ribbon for Sunday or a fresh sash for the baby?' He never spent a penny for drink nor tobacco. And Sunday we'd go out on the downs and stand looking at the sea; it do come in so splendid there, and the wind from it seems to put new life in yer. We was as happy and as well as could be, all of us; and then them newspapers got to printing all those tales of the gold in the Klondike, and Will he just got mad like, and nothing would do but he must sell the house and come out here. He thought he'd come back so rich; well, so he may, but he won't have no wife to go back with."

She lay back in her chair, and Katrine, gazing at her white face and transparent hands, said nothing.

"I'm glad I stuck to Will, though," the woman went on softly after a minute, "and didn't let him come out here alone. A wife's place is by her husband wherever he goes, and I'd rather die with him than be separated. But there, I do hate the name of gold. It broke up our home, it's broke up our lives, and it's just killed me, that's what it's done.

And what's the good of it? Why, as I said to Will before we came, 'We can't be no more than happy, and we're that now.'"

Katrine said nothing. She was one of those women who in society would have gained the name of a good conversationalist, for she always listened attentively and spoke hardly at all.

It grew rapidly darker outside and began to snow a little, the peculiar sharp, small snow of Alaska. The two women could hardly see each other's faces in the gloom, when Katrine rose and offered to light the lamp.

"There ain't no oil left," returned Annie, drearily. "I just sit in the dark most of the time; I don't mind as long as I have a bit of fire. It do seem more lonesome though when you've no light," she added with a sigh.

"Haven't you any money to buy it with?"

Annie shook her head. "Not till Will comes back."

"Well, here's enough to keep you in oil for the next three months," said Katrine, taking a little object from her belt which looked like a well-filled tobacco pouch and putting it on the shelf above her head.

"What's that? dust?" said Annie. "Where-ever do you get so much money?"

she added, staring at her.

"I won that last night," returned Katrine, lightly. "I do have such luck. I wish you could come, Annie, and see the fun we have down town of a night, instead of moping up here; and I do have such luck," she repeated again with a half sigh. "I don't know what I'd do if it should change. I'd have to be bar-keep for a living, I suppose. Think I'd make a good bar-keep?" she said, getting up and stretching her arms above her head. All her full lissom figure was revealed to advantage by the att.i.tude, and the firelight fell softly on the gay, bewitching face, slanted over to one shoulder as she put the question.

"I do that," replied Annie, with emphasis. "Your bar would always be crammed by all the chaps in the place, my dear."

Katrine laughed. "I'm glad you think so. I'll bring you some of my oil to burn for to-night, and then I must be off earning my living."

She went into her own cabin and brought back a can of oil with her, trimmed and cleaned and lit Annie's lamp, and then with a kiss bade her good-bye till next day, and took her way down to the main street. She had only a little dust in her belt, just enough to start playing with, and if luck should go against her she would have to return empty handed; but then she always trusted to luck, and it had never forsaken her. Her mode of life, precarious and uncertain, dangerous and unsatisfactory as it might seem to an onlooker, never troubled her. She was in that state of glorious physical health and strength which lends an unlimited confidence to the mind, a sense of being able to cope with any difficulty which might suddenly present itself, when every present or possible trouble looks small, and when mere life itself, the mere sensation of the blood being warm in one's veins, is a joy. She loved the excitement, even the uncertainty of her life, and she had more friends in the town than she could count, who would be glad to lend her all she needed if her luck failed.

That night, when Katrine lay fast asleep in her small inner room, her curly head tucked down comfortably under the rugs, she dreamed she heard a knocking on her door. The sound seemed faint at first, but grew louder, and after a minute she woke up, lifted her head, and listened.

Yes, there was a tapping on her door, she heard it quite distinctly.

She got up immediately, slipped into her fur coat and boots, and taking one of her pistols in her hand, went to the door. That there was danger in answering such a summons at such an hour she knew quite well, but that did not hinder her. She was accustomed to live with her life in her hand, and she felt instinctively confident of being able so to hold it, and meant to keep a tight grip on it. When she opened the door it was to a vivid moonlight, clear and brighter than day; the whole white world was shining under it.

"Annie!" she exclaimed as her eyes fell on the slight, feeble figure m.u.f.fled in a blanket that stood on her steps. "What is the matter? Come in," and she put the door wide open and stood back for her to pa.s.s.

"Oh, Katie," she said, seizing the other's hands when they stood inside the room, "forgive me for waking you, but I want Will. I feel I'm going to die to-night, and I can't without him--I can't," and she burst into a flood of tears broken by short sobbing coughs. She had slipped to her knees and was holding Katrine's hands in a feverish clutch. The blanket had fallen from her head and shoulders, and showed to Katrine that she was still in her day dress; it did not seem as if she had been to bed at all. There was a dark, half-dried stain upon the front of her bodice.

"I'm dying! Oh, Katie, it's so dreadful all alone there. Will you go and bring Will to me? Oh, do."

Katrine looked down upon her as she tried to raise her to her feet. The fire was still burning brightly and filled the room with light. Many people older than Katrine would have laughed at the woman's statement in face of her ability to come to them and make it, but Katrine's keen perceptions read much, too much, in the bright glazed eyes that looked up at her, in the hoa.r.s.e grating tones that came from the sunken chest, and the feverish grasp of those burning fingers. She stooped down and put her arms round the kneeling figure and drew her up.

"Why, of course I will. I will bring him to you. But you are only ill, dear; you're not dying."

"Oh, I may not, I know; but if I should, and he not here! Katie, can you go now?--it's so late, and so cold, and so far. I don't see how you can."

"He's working up on Mr. Wood's claim at the west gulch. I suppose if I go to Mr. Wood's cabin he can tell me where to find Will."

"Oh, yes, yes," returned Annie, eagerly, a crimson flush now lighting up each cheek; "go straight to Mr. Wood and ask him for Will. One of Will's ponies is down here, back of our house; you can take him and ride up.

Oh, it may kill you to go; I ought not to ask it. Oh, what shall I do?"

Katrine laughed. "Kill me!" she said. "It would take more to kill me than that, I think. I shall be up there and Will down here before you know where you are. Now you've just got to drink this brandy while I go and get some things on. You're just fretting for Will, that's what is the matter with you. I believe you will feel all right when you see him again."

She put the trembling woman into a chair, and went back to her room to put her clothes on. She noticed that her boots, which had been damp the night before, had frozen to the ground, and she had to break them from it by force.

"I shall be lucky if I get back with my feet unfrozen," she thought to herself, looking regretfully at the warm bed she had left; but it never once, even remotely, occurred to her to refuse the unwelcome mission.

She put on all her thickest garments, buckled her pistols on her hip, and went back to Annie, who was crouching over the fire in the next room.

"I had better take the pony," she said; "he'll get me there and back quicker than I can walk, if you think the little animal is up to it."

Annie nodded. "He's well fed," she said, "and has had nothing to do since Will's been gone."

Katrine shut the stove up, and the two women went out together.

It was a still dead cold without, the sort of night on which your limbs might freeze beyond recovery, and without your knowing it, so insidious and so little aggressive was the cold.

"You go in and keep warm," said Katrine; "I'll find the pony and manage him," and she pushed Annie gently within her own door, and went round to the shed at the back of the cabin where the pony was. Her hands in that short time had grown so stiff with cold she could hardly put the saddle on and fasten the girth and straps. The pony knew her, and p.r.i.c.ked his ears and snorted while she was getting him ready; he had been idle in his stable two days, and by this time was willing to welcome any change in the monotony of life. When she had adjusted everything carefully by the light of the strong moon falling through the little window, she threw herself cross leg upon his back and rode him out of the shed.

Annie had her face pressed eagerly against the back window of her cabin, watching for her to appear. Katrine smiled at her, lifted her fur cap above her head for an instant as a man would do, and then the next moment was cantering away over the snowy waste that stretched behind Good Luck Row. She went at a good pace, urged on by that last glimpse of the pale face, with the terrible look of haunted fear on it, pressed to the window.

The temperature was very low, but the absence of wind and dampness in the air made the cold bearable. Katrine, haunted by the fear of frostbite, kept pinching her nose and pulling her ears and banging her feet against the pony's side to keep the blood stirring in them. Inside the first half-hour she was away some distance from the lights of Dawson, and nothing but great snowy stretches lay around her.

That night up at the west gulch it happened that neither Stephen nor Talbot had gone to bed. There is little to choose between night and day there, since half of the day hours are dark as the blackest night, and a man can sleep in them as profitably or more so than in the moonlit hours of the night. Three o'clock in the morning had come, and the two men were still sitting talking on each side of the stove, with an opened whisky bottle on the table between them, in Stephen's cabin, when the dull sound of a horse's footfall broke the blank silence of the gulch.

Both sprang to their feet on the instant, and Talbot drew his pistol from his belt and stood listening with it in his hand.

"I always said we oughtn't to keep our gold up here," said Stephen, and his face whitened.

Talbot held up his hand to enjoin silence, and they waited while the sound of hoofs moving slowly over the treacherous and uneven soil came nearer. Then there was a pause, which seemed to the men inside endless.

Then two distinct taps at the door. Talbot, who was nearer it, made a forward movement, but Stephen caught his arm.

"What are you going to do?" he whispered.

"Open it and fire," returned Talbot, laconically, and he pushed back the latch and raised his revolver as he opened the door.

Stephen was close behind him, and Talbot almost stepped upon him as he drew back with astonishment the next instant. Katrine jumped from the pony's back and stepped over the threshold without invitation.

"How lucky I am to find you up!" she exclaimed, and then seeing Talbot's hastily lowered revolver in his right hand she burst out laughing. "So you were going to shoot, were you?" she said, drawing out her own.

"Well, I was quite ready; I have been all the ride. I am sorry I frightened you."

"Frightened us!" repeated the two men in a breath, with an indignant glance.