fficial on her way in to join him.

A short, thick-set man who had ridden down on the stage with Elliot to
Pierre's Portage drifted along the deck toward him. He wore the careless
garb of a mining man in a country which looks first to comfort.

"Bound for Kusiak?" he asked, by way of opening conversation.

"Yes," answered Gordon.

The miner nodded toward the group under the awning. "That bunch lives
at Kusiak. They've got on at different places the last two or three
days--except Selfridge and his wife, they've been out. Guess you can
tell that from hearing her talk--the little woman in red with the snappy
black eyes. She's spillin' over with talk about the styles in New York
and the cabarets and the new shows. That pot-bellied little fellow in
the checked suit is Selfridge. He is Colby Macdonald's man Friday."

Elliot took in with a quickened interest the group bound for Kusiak. He
had noticed that they monopolized as a matter of course the best places
on the deck and in the dining-room. They were civil enough to outsiders,
but their manner had the unconscious selfishness that often regulates
social activities. It excluded from their gayety everybody that did not
belong to the proper set.

"That sort of thing gets my goat," the miner went on sourly. "Those
women over there have elected themselves Society with a capital S. They
put on all the airs the Four Hundred do in New York. And who the hell
are they anyhow?--wives to a bunch of grafting politicians mostly."

From the casual talk that had floated to him, with its many little
allusions punctuating the jolly give-and-take of their repartee, Elliot
guessed that their lives had the same background of tennis, dinners,
hops, official gossip, and business. They evidently knew one another
with the intimacy that comes only to the segment of a small community
shut off largely from the world and forced into close social relations.
No doubt they had loaned each other money occasionally, stood by in
trouble, and gossiped back and forth about their shortcomings and family
skeletons even as society on the outside does.

"That's the way of the world, isn't it? Our civilization is built on the
group system," suggested Elliot.

"Maybeso," grumbled the miner. "But I hate to see Alaska come to it.
Me, I saw this country first in '97--packed an outfit in over the Pass.
Every man stood on his own hind legs then. He got there if he was
strong--mebbe; he bogged down on the trail g