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“I can’t throw her off, or shoot her up,” says he, “or even cuss at her like I want to, ’cause she’s a lady.” And it appeared like that’d been her graft ever since–presumin’ on her sex to make disturbances. In six months we hated her like pizen.

There wasn’t a stampede in a hundred miles where her bloomers wasn’t leading, for she had the endurance of a moose; and between excitements she prospected for trouble in the manner of relocations.

I’ve heard of fellers speakin’ disrespectful to her and then wandering around dazed and loco after she’d got through painting word pictures of ’em. It goes without saying she was generally popular and petted, and when the Commissioner invited her to duck out down the river, the community sighed, turned over, and had a peaceful rest–first one since she’d come in.

I hadn’t seen her from that time till I blowed into Slisco’s on the bosom of this forty mile, forty below blizzard.

Setting around the fire that night I found that she’d just lost another of her famous lawsuits–claimed she owned a fraction ‘longside of No. 20, Buster Creek, and that the Lund boys had changed their stakes so as to take in her ground. During the winter they’d opened up a hundred and fifty feet of awful rich pay right next to her line, and she’d raised the devil. Injunctions, hearings and appeals, and now she was coming back, swearing she’d been “jobbed,” the judge had been bought, and the jury corrupted.

“It’s the richest strike in the district,” says she. “They’ve rocked out $11,000 since snow flew, and there’s 30,000 buckets of dirt on the dump. They can bribe and bulldoze a decision through this court, but I’ll have that fraction yet, the robbers.”

“Robbers be cussed,” speaks up the mail man. “You’re the cause of the trouble yourself. If you don’t get a square deal, it’s your own fault–always looking for technicalities in the mining laws. It’s been your game from the start to take advantage of your skirts, what there is of ’em, and jump, jump, jump. Nobody believes half you say. You’re a natural disturber, and if you was a man you’d have been hung long ago.”

I’ve heard her oral formations, and I looked for his epidermis to shrivel when she got her replications focused. She just soared up and busted.

“Look out for the stick,” thinks I.

“Woman, am I,” she says, musical as a bum gramophone under the slow bell. “I take advantage of my skirts, do I? Who are you, you mangy ‘malamoot,’ to criticise a lady? I’m more of a man than you, you tin-horn; I want no favours; I do a man’s work; I live a man’s life; I am a man, and I’m proud of it, but you–; Nome’s full of your kind; you need a woman to support you; you’re a protoplasm, a polyp. Those Swedes changed their stakes to cover my fraction. I know it, they know it, and if it wasn’t Alaska, God would know it, but He won’t be in again till spring, and then the season’s only three months long. I’ve worked like a man, suffered like a man–“

“Why don’t ye’ lose like a man?” says he.

“I will, and I’ll fight like one, too,” says she, while her eyes burned like faggots. “They’ve torn away the reward of years of work and agony, and they forget I can hate like a man.”

She was stretched up to high C, where her voice drowned the howl of the storm, and her seamed old face was a sight. I’ve seen mild, shrinky, mouse-shy women ‘roused to hell’s own fury, and I felt that night that here was a bad enemy for the Swedes of Buster Creek.

She stopped, listening.

“What’s that? There’s some one at the door.”