ence and respect. Even the man
with the silver faro-box for a breastwork rose up and stood in her
presence while she remained. He did not do it on purpose. He would not
have done it the day before had she stood before him by the hour. He did
not even know when he arose, but when she bowed just the least bit, and
turned away and went out again into the cold and did not drink--did not
drink, mind you--did not even look at the crimson-headed man who had
risen up in perfect confidence, he found himself standing, and found his
heart filling with a kind of gallantry that he had not known before. He
had risen in her presence by instinct.

"Come, we must find Captain Tommy." The woman said this to Limber Tim as
they left the saloon, and then led swiftly on to Captain Tommy's cabin.

This Captain Tommy was a character and a power too, and, wretch as she
was, was a woman to be leaned upon, and trusted too to the last.

True, she was very plain. But you may adopt it as one of your rules of
life, and act upon it with absolute certainty, that, if you have to
trust any woman, trust a plain one, rather than a handsome one; for the
plain ones were not made to sell, else they too had been made handsome.

"Not to be too particular about a delicate subject," said old Baldy, who
had been fortunate enough to know her, "her memory possibly may reach
back to the Black Hawk War."

But the crowning feature of this woman was her enormous head of hair. It
was black as night and bushy as a Kanaka's; all about her head in a
heap, that seemed to be constantly in motion. But at the back and down
between her shoulders it had gathered into a queue, and hung down there
like a bell-rope with a black tassel at the end.

She generally kept her mouth closed. But men observed that, when she
wanted to say any thing, she pulled up her back, took hold of the
bell-rope, and pulled and pulled till her mouth came open; then she
would throw out her sunken breast, and wind and wind with her two hands,
and corkscrew at her back hair, and pull and twist and wind, until she
had wound herself up so tight that it was impossible to close either her
mouth or her eyes. After that she could talk faster than any man in the
world, and faster than a great many women, until she ran down, and the
bell-rope hung loose between her shoulders. Then her mouth would close
suddenly, and she would have to stop that instant, even if in the midst
of a sentence, until she could seize t