he loved, but of woman, only one, and
she was the mother of Marie Chauvet."

Here I groaned aloud, having meditated beyond self-control over the fact
that I paid this man two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

"What's the matter now?" he demanded.

"Matter?" I complained. "I thought you were telling the story of Flush
of Gold. I don't want a biography of your old French wine-bibber."

Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
"And you asked me to begin at the beginning," he said.

"Yes," said I; "the beginning."

"And the beginning of Flush of Gold is the old French wine-bibber, for he
was the father of Marie Chauvet, and Marie Chauvet was the Flush of Gold.
What more do you want? Victor Chauvet never had much luck to speak of.
He managed to live, and to get along, and to take good care of Marie, who
resembled the one woman he had loved. He took very good care of her.
Flush of Gold was the pet name he gave her. Flush of Gold Creek was
named after her--Flush of Gold town site, too. The old man was great on
town sites, only he never landed them.

"Now, honestly," Lon said, with one of his lightning changes, "you've
seen her, what do you think of her--of her looks, I mean? How does she
strike your beauty sense?"

"She is remarkably beautiful," I said. "I never saw anything like her in
my life. In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I
could not keep my eyes off of her. It wasn't curiosity. It was wonder,
sheer wonder, she was so strangely beautiful."

"She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her," Lon
said softly. "She was truly the Flush of Cold. She turned all men's
hearts . . . and heads. She recalls, with an effort, that I once won a
canoe race at Dawson--I, who once loved her, and was told by her of her
love for me. It was her beauty that made all men love her. She'd 'a'
got the apple from Paris, on application, and there wouldn't have been
any Trojan War, and to top it off she'd have thrown Paris down. And now
she lives in darkness, and she who was always fickle, for the first time
is constant--and constant to a shade, to a dead man she does not realize
is dead.

"And this is the way it was. You remember what I said last night of Dave
Walsh--Big Dave Walsh? He was all that I said, and more, many times
more. He came into this country in the late eighties--that's a pioneer
for you. He was twenty years old then.