The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Girl of the Klondike, by Victoria Cross

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Title: A Girl of the Klondike

Author: Victoria Cross

Release Date: December 4, 2007 [EBook #23732]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE ***

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A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE

By

VICTORIA CROSS

"_Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames?_"

NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

_A Girl of the Klondike is now issued
in America for the first time
by arrangement with the author._

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I A NIGHT IN TOWN 9

CHAPTER II AT THE WEST GULCH 49

CHAPTER III KATRINE'S NEIGHBOURS 99

CHAPTER IV GOD'S GIFT 167

CHAPTER V GOLD-PLATED 211

CHAPTER VI MAMMON'S PAY 265

L'ENVOI 314

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 passes where the trails had been made by tracks of blood.
Day by day, as long as the light of day--God's glorious gift to man--had
lasted, these trails across the passes, between the snowy peaks, the
peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human
cruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow
terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river
through these passes, 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 passes, 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,