they hear about it, though. They're apt to tear you to shreds. They're crazy!"
Glenister had been thinking rapidly.
"If you do that, you'll have mutiny in an hour. This isn't the crowd to stand that sort of thing."
"Bah! Let 'em try it. I'll put 'em down." The officer's square jaws clicked.
"Maybe so; but what then? We reach Nome and the Health Inspector hears of small-pox suspects, then we're all quarantined for thirty days; eight hundred of us. We'll lie at Egg Island all summer while your company pays five thousand a day for this ship. That's not all. The firm is liable in damages for your carelessness in letting disease aboard."
"MY CARELESSNESS!" The old man ground his teeth.
"Yes; that's what it amounts to. You'll ruin your owners, all right.
You'll tie up your ship and lose your job, that's a cinch!"
Captain Stephens wiped the moisture from his brow angrily.
"My carelessness! Curse you—you say it well. Don't you realize that I am criminally liable if I don't take every precaution?" He paused for a moment, considering. "I'll hand her over to the ship's doctor."
"See here, now," Glenister urged. "We'll be in Nome in a week—before the young lady would have time to show symptoms of the disease, even if she were going to have it—and a thousand to one she hasn't been exposed, and will never show a trace of it. Nobody knows she's aboard but we three. Nobody will see her get off. She'll stay in this cabin, which will be just as effectual as though you isolated her in any other part of the boat. It will avoid a panic—you'll save your ship and your company—no one will be the wiser—then if the girl comes down with small-pox after she gets ashore, she can go to the pest-house and not jeopardize the health of all the people aboard this ship. You go up forrad to your bridge, sir, and forget that you stepped in to see old Bill Dextry this morning. Well take care of this matter all right. It means as much to us as it does to you. We've GOT to be on Anvil Creek before the ground thaws or we'll lose the Midas. If you make a fuss, you'll ruin us all."
For some moments they watched him breathlessly as he frowned in indecision, then—
"You'll have to look out for the steward," he said, and the girl sank to a stool while two great tears rolled down her cheeks. The captain's eyes softened and his voice was gentle as he laid his hand on her head.
"Don't feel hurt over what I said, miss. You see, appearances don't tell much, hereabouts—most of the pretty ones are no good. They've fooled me many a time, and I made a mistake. These men will help you through; I can't. Then when you get to Nome, make your sweetheart marry you the day you land. You are too far north to be alone."
He stepped out into the passage and closed the door carefully.
CHAPTER III
IN WHICH GLENISTER ERRS
"Well, bein' as me an' Glenister is gougin' into the bowels of Anvil Creek all last summer, we don't really get the fresh-grub habit fastened on us none. You see, the gamblers down-town cop out the few aigs an' green vegetables that stray off the ships, so they never get out as far as the Creek none; except, maybe, in the shape of anecdotes.
"We don't get intimate with no nutriments except hog-boosum an' brown beans, of which luxuries we have unstinted measure, an' bein' as this is our third year in the country we hanker for bony fido grub, somethin' scan'lous. Yes, ma'am—three years without a taste of fresh fruit nor meat nor nuthin'—except pork an' beans. Why, I've et bacon till my immortal soul has growed a rind.
"When it comes time to close down the claim, the boy is sick with the fever an' the only ship in port is a Point Barrow whaler, bound for Seattle. After I book our passage, I find they have nothin' aboard to eat except canned salmon, it bein' the end of a two years' cruise, so when I land in the States after seventeen days of a fish diet, I am what you might call sated with canned grub, and have added salmon to the list of things concernin' which I am goin' to economize.
"Soon's ever I get the boy into a hospital, I gallop up to the best restarawnt in town an' prepare for the huge pot-latch. This here, I determine, is to be a gormandizin' jag which shall live in hist'ry, an' wharof in later years the natives of Puget Sound shall speak with bated breath.
"First, I call for five dollars' worth of pork an' beans an' then a full-grown platter of canned salmon. When the waiter lays 'em out in front of me, I look them vittles coldly in their disgustin' visages, an' say in sarcastic accents:
"'Set there, damn you! an' watch me eat REAL grub,' which I proceed to do, cleanin' the menu from soda to hock. When I have done my worst, I pile bones an' olive seeds an' peelin's all over them articles of nourishment, stick toothpicks into 'em, an' havin' offered 'em what other indignities occur to me, I leave the place."
Dextry and the girl were leaning over the stern-rail, chatting idly in the darkness. It was the second night out and the ship lay dead in the ice-pack. All about them was a flat, floe-clogged sea, leprous and mottled in the deep twilight that midnight brought in this latitude. They had threaded into the ice-field as long as the light lasted, following the lanes of blue water till they closed, then drifting idly till others appeared; worming out into leagues of open sea, again creeping into the shifting labyrinth till darkness rendered progress perilous.
Occasionally they had passed herds of walrus huddled sociably upon ice-pans, their wet hides glistening in the sunlight. The air had been clear and pleasant, while away on all quarters they had seen the smoke of other ships toiling through the barrier. The spring fleet was knocking at the door of the Golden North.
Chafing at her imprisonment, the girl had asked the old man to take her out on deck under the shelter of darkness; then she had led him to speak of his own past experiences, and of Glenister's; which he had done freely. She was frankly curious about them, and she wondered at their apparent lack of interest in her own identity and her secret mission. She even construed their silence as indifference, not realizing that these Northmen were offering her the truest evidence of camaraderie.
The frontier is capable of no finer compliment than this utter disregard of one's folded pages. It betokens that highest faith in one's fellow-man, the belief that he should be measured by his present deeds, not by his past. It says, translated: "This is God's free country where a man is a man, nothing more. Our land is new and pure, our faces are to the front. If you have been square, so much the better; if not, leave behind the taints of artificial things and start again on the level—that's all."
It had happened, therefore, that since the men had asked her no questions, she had allowed the hours to pass and still hesitated to explain further than she had explained to Captain Stephens. It was much easier to let things continue as they were; and there was, after all, so little that she was at liberty to tell them.
In the short time since meeting them, the girl had grown to like Dextry, with his blunt chivalry and boyish, whimsical philosophy, but she avoided Glenister, feeling a shrinking, hidden terror of him, ever since her eavesdropping of the previous night. At the memory of that scene she grew hot, then cold—hot with anger, icy at the sinister power and sureness which had vibrated in his voice. What kind of life was she entering where men spoke of strange women with this assurance and hinted thus of ownership? That he was handsome and unconscious of it, she acknowledged, and had she met him in her accustomed circle of friends, garbed in the conventionalities, she would perhaps have thought of him as a striking man, vigorous and intelligent; but here he seemed naturally to take on the attributes of his surroundings, acquiring a picturesque negligee of dress and morals, and suggesting rugged, elemental, chilling potentialities. While with him—and he had sought her repeatedly that day—she was uneasily aware of his strong personality tugging at her; aware of the unbridled passionate flood of a nature unbrooking of delay and heedless of denial. This it was that antagonized her and set her every mental sinew in rigid resistance.