m door
to go in. The eyes of the young woman were blind with tears and she was
biting her lip to keep back the emotion that welled up. He knew she was
very fond of the motherless children, but he guessed at an additional
reason for her sobs. She too was as untaught as a child in the life of
this frontier land. Whatever she found here--how much of hardship or
happiness, of grief or woe--she knew that she had left behind forever
the safe harborage of quiet waters in which her life craft had always
floated.

It came on to rain in the afternoon. Heavy clouds swept across from the
mountains, and the sodden sky opened like a sluice-box. The Kusiak
contingent, driven indoors, resorted to bridge. Miss O'Neill read.
Gordon Elliot wrote letters, dawdled over magazines, and lounged
alternately in the ladies' parlor and the smoking-room, where Macdonald,
Strong, a hardware merchant from Fairbanks, and a pair of sour-dough
miners had settled themselves to a poker game that was to last all night
and well into the next day.

Of the two bridge tables all the players were old-timers except Mrs.
Mallory. Most of them were young enough in years, but they had been of
the North long enough to know the gossip of the country and its small
politics intimately. They shared common hopes of the day when Alaska
would be thrown open to industry and a large population.

But Mrs. Mallory had come in over the ice for the first time last
winter. The other women felt that she was a bird of passage, that the
frozen Arctic could be no more than a whim to her. They deferred a
little to her because she knew the great world--New York, Vienna,
London, Paris. Great names fell from her lips casually and carelessly.
She referred familiarly to princes and famous statesmen, as if she had
gossiped with them tete-a-tete over the teacups. She was full of spicy
little anecdotes about German royalty and the British aristocracy. It
was no wonder, Gordon Elliot thought, that she had rather stunned the
little social set of Kusiak.

Through Northrup and Trelawney a new slant on Macdonald was given to
Gordon. He had fallen into casual talk with them after dinner on the
fore deck. It was still raining, but all three were equipped with
slickers or mackintoshes. To his surprise the young man discovered that
they bore him no grudge at all for his interference the night before.

"But we ain't through with Colby Macdonald yet," Trelawney explained.
"Mind, I don't say we're