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“Madam,” says I, and somehow the word didn’t seem out of place any more–“Madam, why do you want to avoid this party?”

“Take me away,” she says. “It’s my daughter. She’s going to find me this way, all rough and immodest and made fun of. But that’s the worst you can say, isn’t it? I’m a square woman–you know I am, don’t you, boys?” and she looked at us fierce and pleadin’.

“Sure,” says Joe. “We’ll boost you with the girl all right.”

“She thinks her father’s dead, but he isn’t–he ran away with a show woman–a year after we were married. I never told her about it, and I’ve tried to make a little lady of her.”

We found out afterwards that she had put the girl in a boarding-school, but couldn’t seem to make enough for both of them, and when the Klondyke was struck thought she saw a chance. She came north, insulted by deck hands and laughed at by the officers. At Skagway she nursed a man through typhoid, and when he could walk he robbed her. The mounted police took everything else she had and mocked at her. “Your kind always has money,” they said.

That’s how it had been everywhere, and that’s why she was so hard and bitter. She’d worked and fought like a man, but she’d suffered like a woman.

“I’ve lied and starved and stolen for her,” said Annie, “to make her think I was doing well. She said she was coming in to me, but I knew winter would catch her at Dawson, and I thought I could head her off by spring.”

“Now, she’s here; but, men, as your mothers loved you, save me from my little girl.”

She buried her face, and when I looked at the boys, tears stood in Joe Slisco’s eyes and the others breathed hard. Ole Lund, him that was froze worst about the hands, spoke up:

“Someboady tak de corner dat blanket an’ blow may nose.”

Then we heard voices outside.

“Hello, in there.”

Annie stood up, clutching at her throat, and stepped behind the corner of the bunks as the door opened, framing the prettiest picture this old range rider ever saw.

‘Twas a girl, glowing pink and red where the cold had kissed her cheeks, with yellow curlicues of hair wandering out under her yarn cap. Her little fox-trimmed parka quit at the knees, showing the daintiest pair of–I can’t say it. Anyhow, they wasn’t, they just looked like ’em, only nicer.

She stood blinking at us, coming from the bright light outside, as cute as a new faro box–then:

“Can you tell me where Mrs. Bradshaw lives? She’s somewhere in this district. I’m her daughter–come all the way from the States to see her.”

When she smiled I could hear the heart-strings of those ragged, whiskered, frost-bit “mushers” bustin’ like banjo strings.

“You know her, don’t you?” she says, turning to me.

“Know her, Miss? Well, I should snort! There ain’t a prospector on the range that ain’t proud and honoured to call her a friend. Leastways, if there is I’ll bust his block,” and I cast the bad eye on the boys to wise ’em up.

“Ain’t I right, Joe?”

“Betcher dam life,” says Joe, sort of over-stepping the conventions.

“Then tell me where her claim is. It’s quite rich, and you must know it,” says she, appealing to him.

Up against it? Say! I seen the whites of his eyes show like he was drownding, and he grinned joyful as a man kicked in the stummick.

“Er–er–I just bought in here, and ain’t acquainted much,” says he. “Have a drink,” and, in his confusions, he sets out the bottle of alkalies that he dignifies by the alias of booze. Then he continues with reg’lar human intelligence.

“Bill, here, he can tell you where the ground is,” and the whelp indicates me.

Lord knows my finish, but for Ole Lund. He sits up in his bunk, swaddled in Annie Black’s bandages, and through slits between his frost bites, he moults the follering rhetoric:

“Aye tole you vere de claim iss. She own de Nomber Twenty fraction on Buster Creek, ‘longside may and may broder. She’s dam good fraction, too.”

I consider that a blamed white stunt for Swedes; paying for their lives with the mine they swindled her out of.

Anyhow, it knocked us galley-west.

I’d formulated a swell climax, involving the discovery of the mother, when the mail man spoke up, him that had been her particular abomination, a queer kind of a break in his voice:

“Come out of that.”

Mrs. Bradshaw moved out into the light, and, if I’m any judge, the joy that showed in her face rubbed away the bitterness of the past years. With an aching little cry the girl ran to her, and hid in her arms like a quail.

We men-folks got accumulated up into a dark corner where we shook hands and swore soft and insincere, and let our throats hurt, for all the world like it was Christmas or we’d got mail from home.