in her presence 322

The Yukon Trail

CHAPTER I

GOING "IN"

The midnight sun had set, but in a crotch between two snow-peaks it
had kindled a vast caldron from which rose a mist of jewels, garnet
and turquoise, topaz and amethyst and opal, all swimming in a sea of
molten gold. The glow of it still clung to the face of the broad Yukon,
as a flush does to the soft, wrinkled cheek of a girl just roused from
deep sleep.

Except for a faint murkiness in the air it was still day. There was
light enough for the four men playing pinochle on the upper deck, though
the women of their party, gossiping in chairs grouped near at hand, had
at last put aside their embroidery. The girl who sat by herself at a
little distance held a magazine still open on her lap. If she were not
reading, her attitude suggested it was less because of the dusk than
that she had surrendered herself to the spell of the mysterious beauty
which for this hour at least had transfigured the North to a land all
light and atmosphere and color.

Gordon Elliot had taken the boat at Pierre's Portage, fifty miles
farther down the river. He had come direct from the creeks, and his
impressions of the motley pioneer life at the gold-diggings were so
vivid that he had found an isolated corner of the deck where he could
scribble them in a notebook while still fresh.

But he had not been too busy to see that the girl in the wicker chair
was as much of an outsider as he was. Plainly this was her first trip
in. Gordon was a stranger in the Yukon country, one not likely to be
over-welcome when it became known what his mission was. It may have been
because he was out of the picture himself that he resented a little the
exclusion of the young woman with the magazine. Certainly she herself
gave no evidence of feeling about it. Her long-lashed eyes looked
dreamily across the river to the glowing hills beyond. Not once did they
turn with any show of interest to the lively party under the awning.

From where he was leaning against the deckhouse Elliot could see only
a fine, chiseled profile shading into a mass of crisp, black hair, but
some quality in the detachment of her personality stimulated gently his
imagination. He wondered who she could be. His work had taken him to
frontier camps before, but he could not place her as a type. The best
he could do was to guess that she might be the daughter of some
territorial o