We didn't like Montague Prosser at first—he was too clean. He wore his virtue like a bath-robe, flapping it in our faces. It was Whitewater Kelly who undertook to mitigate him one day, but, being as the nuisance stood an even fathom high and had a double-action football motion about him, Whitewater's endeavors kind of broke through the ice and he languished around in his bunk the next week while we sat up nights and changed his bandages.

Yes, Monty was equally active at repartee or rough-house, and he knocked Whitewater out from under his cap, slick and clean, just the way you snap a playing-card out from under a coin, which phenomenon terminated our tendencies to scoff and carp.

Personally, I didn't care. If a man wants to wallow about in a disgusting daily debauch of cleanliness, it is his privilege. If he squanders the fleeting moments brushing teeth, cleaning fingernails, and such technicalities, it stands to reason he won't have much time left to attend to his work and at the same time cultivate the essentials of life like smoking, drinking, and the proper valuation of a three-card draw. But, as I say, it's up to him, and outsiders who don't see merit in such a system shouldn't try to bust up his game unless they've got good foot-work and a knockout punch.

It wasn't so much these physical refinements that riled us as the rarefied atmosphere of his general mental and moral altitudes. To me there's eloquence and sentiment and romance and spiritual uplift in a real, full-grown, black-whiskered cuss-word. It's a great help in a mountainous country. Profanity is like steam in a locomotive—takes more to run you up-hill than on the level, and inasmuch as there's only a few men on the level, a violent vocabulary is a necessity and appeals to me like a certificate of good character and general capability.

There wasn't a thing doing with Prosser in the idiom line, however. His moral make-up was like his body, big and sound and white and manicured, and although his talk, alongside of ours, listened like it was skimmed and seminaried, still when we got to know him we found that his verbal structures had vital organs and hair on their chests just like anybody else's, and at the same time had the advantage of being fit to send through the mails.

He had left a widowed mother and come north on the main chance, like the rest of us, only he originated farther east. What made the particular ten-strike with us was the pride he took in that same mother. He gloried in her and talked about her in that hushed and nervous way a man speaks about a real mother or a regular sweetheart. We men-folks liked him all the better for it. I say we men, for he was a "shine" with the women—all nine of them. The camp was fifteen hundred strong that winter, over and above which was the aforesaid galaxy of nine, stranded on their way up-river to a Dawson dance-hall. The Yukon froze up and they had to winter with us. Of course there were the three married ladies, too, living with their husbands back on the Birch Ridge, but we never saw them and they didn't count. The others went to work at Eckert's theater.

Monty would have been right popular at Eckert's—he was a handsome lad—but he couldn't see those people with a field-glass. They simply scandalized him to death.

"I love to dance," said he, one night, as we looked on, "and the music sends thrills through me, but I won't do it."

"Why not?" I asked. "This is Alaska. Be democratic. You're not so awfully nice that a dance-hall girl will contaminate you."

"It's not democracy that I lack, nor contamination that I'm afraid of," he replied. "It's the principle back of it all. If we encourage these girls in the lives they lead, we're just as bad as they are."

"Look here, son, when I quit salt water I left all that garbage and bilge-water talk about 'guilt' and 'responsibility' behind. The days are too short, the nights are too cold, and grub is too dear for me to spare time to theorize. I take people the way I take work and play—just as they come—and I'd advise you to do the same."

"No, sir; I won't associate with gamblers and crooks, so why should I hobnob with these women? They're worse than the men, for all the gamblers have lost is their honesty. Every time I see these girls I think of the little mother back home. It's awful. Suppose she saw me dancing with them?"

Well, that's a bad line of talk and I couldn't say much.

Of course, when the actresses found out how he felt they came back at him strong, but he wrapped himself up in his dignity and held himself aloof when he came to town, so he didn't seem to mind it.

It was one afternoon in January, cold and sharp, that Ollie Marceau's team went through the ice just below our camp. She was a great dog-puncher and had the best team in camp—seven fine malamoots—which she drove every day. When the animals smelled our place they ran away and dragged her into the open water below the hot springs. She was wet for ten minutes, and by the time she had got out and stumbled to our bunk-house she was all in. Another ten minutes with the "quick" at thirty below would have finished her, but we rushed her in by the fire and made her drink a glass of "hootch." Martin got her parka off somehow while I slashed the strings to her mukluks and had her little feet rubbed red as berries before she'd quit apologizing for the trouble she'd made. A fellow learns to watch toes pretty close in the winter.

"Lord! stop your talk," we said. "This is the first chance we have had to do anything for a lady in two years. It's a downright pleasure for us to take you in this way."

"Indeed!" she chattered. "Well, it isn't mutual—" And we all laughed.

We roused up a good fire and made her take off all the wet clothes she felt she could afford to, then wrung them out and hung them up to dry. We made her gulp down another whisky, too, after which I gave her some footgear and she slipped into one of Martin's Mackinaw shirts. We knew just how faint and shaky she felt, but she was dead game and joked with us about it.

I never realized what a cute trick she was till I saw her in that great, coarse, blue shirt with her feet in beaded moccasins, her yellow hair tousled, and the sparkle of adventure in her bright eyes. She stood out like a nugget by candle-light, backed as she was, by the dingy bark walls of our cabin.

I suppose it was a bad instant for Prosser to appear. He certainly cued in wrong and found the sight shocking to his Plymouth Rock proprieties.

The raw liquor we had forced on her had gone to her head a bit, as it will when you're fresh from the cold and your stomach is empty, so her face was flushed and had a pretty, reckless, daring look to it. She had her feet high up on a chair, too—not so very high, either—where they were thawing out under the warmth of the oven, and we were all laughing at her story of the mishap.

Monty stopped on recognizing who she was, while the surprise in his face gave way to disapproval. We could see it as plain as if it was blazoned there in printer's ink, and it sobered us. The girl removed her feet and stood up.

"Miss Marceau has just had an accident," I began, but I saw his eyes were fastened on the bottle on the table, and I saw also that he knew what caused the fever in her cheeks.

"Too bad," he said, coldly. "If I can be of any assistance you'll find me down at the shaft-house." And out he walked.

I knew he didn't intend to be inhospitable; that it was just his infernal notions of decency, and that he refused to be a party to anything as devilish as this looked—but it wasn't according to the Alaska code, and it was like a slap in the girl's face.

"I am quite dry," she said. "I'll be going now."

"You will not. You'll stay to supper and drive home by moonlight," says we. "Why, you'd freeze in a mile!" And we made her listen to us.

During the meal Prosser never opened his mouth except to put something into it, but his manner was as full of language as an oration. He didn't thaw out the way a man should when he sees strangers wading into the grub he's paid a dollar a pound for, and when we'd finally sent the young woman off Martin turned on him.

"Young feller," said he—and his eyes were black—"I've rattled around for thirty years and seen many a good and many a bad man, but I never before seen such an intelligent dam' fool as you are."

"What do you mean?" said the boy.

"You've broke about the only law that this here country boasts of—the law of hospitality."

"He didn't mean it that way," I spoke up. "Did you, Monty?"

"Certainly not. I'd help anybody out of trouble—man or woman—but I refuse to mix with that kind of people socially."

"'That kind of people,'" yelled the old man. "And what's the matter with that kind of people? You come creeping out of the milk-and-water East, all pink and perfumed up, and when you get into a bacon-and-beans country where people sweat instead of perspiring you wrinkle your nose like a calf and whine about the kind of people you find. What do you know about people, anyhow? Did you ever want to steal?"

"Of course not," said Prosser, who kept his temper.

"Did you ever want to drink whisky so bad you couldn't stand it?"

"No."

"Did you ever want to kill a man?"

"No."

"Were you ever broke and friendless and hopeless?"

"Why, I can't say I ever was."

"And you've never been downright hungry, either, where you didn't know if you'd ever eat again, have you? Then what license have you got to blame people for the condition you find them in? How do you know what brought this girl where she is?"

"Oh, I pity any woman who is adrift on the world, if that's what you mean, but I won't make a pet out of her just because she is friendless. She must expect that when she chooses her life. Her kind are bad—bad all through. They must be."

"Not on your life. Decency runs deeper than the hives."

"Trouble with you," said I, "you've got a juvenile standard—things are all good or all bad in your eyes—and you can't like a person unless the one overbalances the other. When you are older you'll find that people are like gold-mines, with a thin streak of pay on bed-rock and lots of hard digging above."

"I didn't mean to be discourteous," our man continued, "but I'll never change my feelings about such things. Mind you, I'm not preaching, nor asking you to change your habits—all I want is a chance to live my own life clean."

The mail came in during March, five hundred pounds of it, and the camp went daffy.

Monty had the dogs harnessed ten minutes after we got the news, and we drove the four miles in seventeen minutes. I've known men with sweethearts outside, but I never knew one to act gladder than Monty did at the thought of hearing from his mother.

"You must come and see us when you make your pile," he told me, "or—what's better—we'll go East together next spring and surprise her. Won't that be great? We'll walk in on her in the summer twilight while she is working in her flower-garden. Can't you just see the green trees and smell the good old smells of home? The catbirds will be calling and the grass will be clean and sweet. Why, I'm so tired of the cold and the snow and the white, white mountains that I can hardly stand it."

He ran on in that vein all the way to town, glad and hopeful and boyish—and I wondered why, with his earnestness and loyalty and broad shoulders, he had never loved any woman but his mother. When I was twenty-three my whole romantic system had been mangled and shredded from heart to gizzard. Still, some men get their age all in a lump; they're boys up till the last minute, then they get the Rip Van Winkle while you wait.

This morning was bitter, but the "sour doughs" were lined up outside the store, waiting their turns like a crowd of Parsifal first-nighters, so we fell in with the rest, whipping our arms and stamping our moccasins till the chill ate into our very bones. It took hours to sort the letters, but not a man whimpered. When you wait for vital news a tension comes that chokes complaint. There was no joking here, nor that elephantine persiflage which marks rough men when they forgather in the wilderness. They were the fellows who blazed the trail, bearded, shaggy, and not pretty to look at, for they all knew hardship and went out strong-hearted into this silent land, jesting with danger and singing in the solitudes. Here in the presence of the Mail they laid aside their cloaks of carelessness and saw one another bared to the quick, timid with hunger for the wives and little ones behind.

There were a few like Prosser, in whom there was still the glamour of the Northland and the mystery of the unknown, but they were scattered, and in their eyes the anxious light was growing also.

Five months is a wearying time, and silent suspense will sap the courage. If only one could banish worry; but the long, unbearable nights when the mind leaps and scurries out into the voids of conjecture like sparks from a chimney—well, it's then you roll in your bunk and your sigh ain't from the snow-shoe pain.

A half-frozen man in an ice-clogged dory had brought us our last news, one October day, just before the river stopped, and now, after five months, the curtain parted again.

I saw McGill, the lawyer, in the line ahead of me and noted the grayness of his cheeks, the nervous way his lips worked, and the futile, wandering, uselessness of his hands. Then I remembered. When his letter came the fall before it said the wife was very low, that the crisis was near, and that they would write again in a few days. He had lived this endless time with Fear stalking at his shoulder. He had lain down with it nightly and risen with it grinning at him in the slow, cold dawn. The boys had told me how well he fought it back week after week, but now, edging inch by inch toward the door behind which lay his message, it got the best of him.

I wrung his hand and tried to say something.

"I want to run away," he quavered. "But I'm afraid to."

When we got in at last we met men coming out, and in some faces we saw the marks of tragedy. Others smiled, and these put heart into us.

Old man Tomlinson had four little girls back in Idaho. He got two letters. One was a six-months-old tax-receipt, the other a laundry bill. That meant three months more of silence.

When my turn came and I saw the writing of the little woman something gripped me by the throat, while I saw my hands shake as if they belonged to somebody else. My news was good, though, and I read it slowly—some parts twice—then at last when I looked up I found McGill near me. Unconsciously we had both sought a quiet corner, but he had sunk on to a box. Now, as I glanced at him I saw what made me shiver. The Fear was there again—naked and ugly—for he held one lonesome letter, and its inscription was in no woman's hand. He had crouched there by my side all this time, staring, staring, staring at it, afraid to read—afraid to open it. Some men smile in their agony, shifting their pitiful masks to the last, others curse, and no two will take their blows alike.

McGill was plucking feebly at the end of his envelope, tearing off tiny bits, dropping the fragments at his feet. Now and then he stopped, and when he did he shuddered.

"Buck up, old pal," I said.

Then, recognizing me, he thrust the missive into my hand.

"Tell me—for God's sake—tell me quick. I can't—No, no—wait! Not yet. Don't tell me. I'll know from your face. They said she couldn't live—"

But she had, and he watched me so fiercely that when the light came into my face he snatched the letter from me like a madman.

"Ah-h! Give it to me! Give it to me! I knew it! I told you they couldn't fool me. No, sir. I felt all the time she'd make it. Why, I knew it in my marrow!"

"What's the date?" I inquired.

"September thirtieth," he said. Then, as he realized how old it was, he began to worry again.

"Why didn't they write later? They must know I'll eat my heart out. Suppose she's had a relapse. That's it. They wrote too soon, and now they don't dare tell me. She—got worse—died—months ago, and they're afraid to let me know."

"Stop it," I said, and reasoned sanity back into him.

Monty had taken his mail and run off like a puppy to feast in quiet, so I went over to Eckert's and had a drink.

Sam winked at me as I came in. A man was reading from a letter.

"Go on. I'm interested," said the proprietor.

The fellow was getting full pretty fast and was down to the garrulous stage, but he began again:

"Dear Husband,—I am sorry to hear that you have been so unfortunate, but don't get discouraged. I know you will make a good miner if you stick to it long enough. Don't worry about me. I have rented the front room to a very nice man for fifteen dollars a week. The papers here are full of a gold strike in Siberia, just across Bering Sea from where you are. If you don't find something during the next two years, why not try it over there for a couple?"

"That's what I call a persevering woman," said Eckert, solemnly.

"She's a business woman, too," said the husband. "All I ever got for that room was seven-fifty a week."

It seems I'd missed Montague at the store, but when the crowd came out Ollie Marceau found him away in at the back, having gone there to be alone with his letters. She saw the utter abandon and grief in his pose, and the tears came to her eyes. Impulsively she went up and laid her hand on his bowed head. She had followed the frontier enough to know the signs.

"Oh, Mr. Prosser," she said, "I'm so sorry! Is it the little mother?"

"Yes," he answered, without moving.

"Not—not—" she hesitated.

"I don't know. The letters are up to the middle of December, and she was very sick."

Then, with the quick sentiment of her kind, the girl spoke to him, forgetting herself, her life, his prejudice, everything except the lonely little gray woman off there who had waited and longed just as such another had waited and longed for her, and, inasmuch as Ollie had suffered before as this boy suffered now, in her words there was a sweet sympathy and a perfect understanding.

It was very fine, I think, coming so from her, and when the first shock had passed over he felt that here, among all these rugged men, there was no one to give him the comfort he craved except this child of the dance-halls. Compassion and sympathy he could get from any of us, but he was a boy and this was his first grief, so he yearned for something more, something subtler, perhaps the delicate comprehension of a woman. At any rate, he wouldn't let her leave him, and the tender-hearted lass poured out all the best her warm nature afforded.

In a few days he braced up, however, and stood his sorrow like the rest of us. It made him more of a man in many ways. For one thing, he never scoffed now at any of the nine women, which, taken as an indication, was good. In fact, I saw him several times with the Marceau girl, for he found her always ready and responsive, and came to confide in her rather than in Martin or me, which was quite natural. Martin spoke about it first.

"I hate to see 'em together so much," said he. "One of 'em is going to fall in love, sure, and it won't be reciprocated none. It would serve him right to get it hard, but if she's hit—it'll be too dam' pitiful. You an' I will have to combine forces and beat him up, I reckon."

The days were growing long and warm, the hills were coming bare on the heights, while the snow packed wet at midday when we went into town to sled out grub for the clean-up. We found everybody else there for the same purpose, so the sap began to run through the camp. We were loading at the trading-post the next day when I heard the name of Ollie Marceau. It was a big-limbed fellow from Alder Creek talking, and, as he showed no liquor in his face, what he said sounded all the worse. I have heard as bad many a time without offense, for there is no code of loyalty concerning these girls, but Ollie had got my sympathy, somehow, and I resented the remarks, particularly the laughter. So did Prosser, the Puritan. He looked up from his work, white and dangerous.

"Don't talk that way about a girl," said he to the stranger, and it made a sensation among the crowd.

I never knew a man before with courage enough to kick in public on such subjects. As it was, the man said something so much worse that right there the front busted out of the tiger-cage and for a few brief moments we were given over to chaos.

I had seen Whitewater walloped and I knew how full of parlor tricks the kid was, but this time he went insane. He knocked that man off the counter at the first pass and climbed him with his hobnails as he lay on the floor. A fight is a fight, and a good thing for spectators and participants, for it does more to keep down scurvy than anything I know of, but the thud of those heavy boots into that helpless flesh sickened me, and we rushed Prosser out of there while he struggled like a maniac. I never saw such a complete reversal of form. Somewhere, away back yonder, that boy's forefathers were pirates or cannibals or butchers.

When the fog had cleared out of his brain the reaction was just as powerful. I took him out alone while the others worked over the Alder Creek party, and all at once my man fell apart like wet sawdust.

"What made me do it—what made me do it?" he cried. "I'm crazy. Why, I tried to kill him! And yet what he said is true—that's the worst of it—it's true. Think of it, and I fought for her. What am I coming to?"

After the clean-up we came to camp, waiting for the river to break and the first boat to follow. It was then that the suspense began to tell on our partner. He read and reread his letters, but there was little hope in them, and now, with no work to do, he grew nervous. Added to everything else, our food ran short, and we lived on scraps of whatever was left over from our winter grub-stake. Just out of cussedness the break-up was ten days late, the ten longest days I ever put in, but eventually it came, and a week later also came the mail. We needed food and clothes, we needed whisky, we needed news of the great, distant world—but all we thought of was our mail.

The boy had decided to go home. We were sorry to see him leave, too, for he had the makings of a real man in him even if he shaved three times a week, but no sooner was the steamer tied than he came plunging into my tent like a moose, laughing and dancing in his first gladness. The mother was well again.

Later I went aboard to give him the last lonesome good wishes of the fellow who stays behind and fights along for another year. The big freighter, with her neat staterooms and long, glass-burdened tables, awoke a perfect panic in me to be going with him, to shake this cruel country and drift back to the home and the wife and the pies like mother made.

I found him on the top deck with the Marceau girl, who was saying good-by to him. There was a look about her I had never seen before, and all at once the understanding and the bitter irony of it struck me. This poor waif hadn't had enough to stand, so Love had come to her, just as Kink had predicted—a hopeless love which she would have to fight the way she fought the whole world. It made me bitter and cynical, but I admired her nerve—she was dressed for the sacrifice, trim and well-curried as a thousand-dollar pony. Back of her smile, though, I saw the waiting tears, and my heart bled. Spring is a fierce time for romance, anyhow.

There wasn't time to say much, so I squeezed Monty's hand like a cider-press.

"God bless you, lad! You must come back to us," I said, but he shook his head, and I heard the girl's breath catch. I continued, "Come on, Ollie; I'll help you ashore."

We stood on the bank there together and watched the last of him, tall and clear-cut against the white of the wheel-house, and it seemed to me when he had gone that something bright and vital and young had passed out of me, leaving in its stead discouragement and darkness and age.

"Would you mind walking with me up to my cabin?" Ollie asked.

"Of course not," I said, and we went down the long street, past the theater, the trading-post, and the saloons, till we came to the hill where her little nest was perched. Every one spoke and smiled to her and she answered in the same way, though I knew she was on parade and holding herself with firm hands. As we came near to the end and her pace quickened, however, and I guessed the panic that was on her to be alone where she could drop her mask and become a woman—a poor, weak, grief-stricken woman. But when we were inside at last her manner astounded me. She didn't throw herself on her couch nor go to pieces, as I had dreaded, but turned on me with burning eyes and her hands tight clenched, while her voice was throaty and hoarse. The words came tumbling out in confusion.

"I've let him go," she said. "Yes, and you helped me. Only for you I'd have broken down; but I want you to know I've done one good thing at last in my miserable life. I've held in. He never knew—he never knew. O God! what fools men are!"

"Yes," I said, "you did mighty well. He's a sensitive chap, and if you'd broken down he'd have felt awful bad."

"What!"

She grasped me by the coat lapels and shook me. Yes! That weak little woman shook me, while her face went perfectly livid.

"'He'd have felt badly,' eh? Man! Man! Didn't you see! Are you blind? Why, he asked me to go with him. He asked me to marry him. Think of it—that great, wonderful man asked me to be his wife—me—Olive Marceau, the dancer! Oh, oh! Isn't it funny? Why don't you laugh?"

I didn't laugh. I stood there, picking pieces of fur out of my cap and wondering if ever I should see another woman like this one. She paced about over the skin rugs, tearing at the throat of her dress as if it choked her. There were no tears in her eyes, but her whole frame shook and shuddered as if from great cold, deep set in her bones.

"Why didn't you go?" I asked, stupidly. "You love him, don't you?"

"You know why I didn't go," she cried, fiercely. "I couldn't. How could I go back and meet his mother? Some day she'd find me out and it would spoil his life. No, no! If only she hadn't recovered—No, I don't mean that, either. I'm not his kind, that's all. Ah, God! I let him go—I let him go, and he never knew!"

She was writhing now on her bed in a perfect frenzy, calling to him brokenly, stretching out her arms while great, dry, coughing sobs wrenched her.

"Little one," I said, unsteadily, and my throat ached so that I couldn't trust myself, "you're a brave—girl, and you're his kind or anybody's kind."

With that the rain came, and so I left her alone with her comforting misery. When I told Kink he sputtered like a pinwheel, and every evening thereafter we two went up to her house and sat with her. We could do this because she'd quit the theater the day the boat took Prosser away, and she wouldn't heed Eckert's offers to go back.

"I'm through with it for good," she told us, "though I don't know what else I'm good for. You see, I don't know anything useful, but I suppose I can learn."

"Now, if I wasn't married already—" I said.

"Humph!" snorted Kink. "I ain't so young as neither one of my pardners, miss, but I'm possessed of rare intellectual treasures."

She laughed at both of us.

When a week had passed after the first boat went down with Prosser, we began to look daily for the first up-river steamer, bringing word direct from the outside world. It came one midnight, and as we were getting dressed to go to the landing our tent was torn open and Montague tumbled in upon us.

"What brought you back?" we questioned when we'd finished mauling him.

It was June, and the nights were as light as day in this latitude, so we could see his face plainly.

"Why—er—" He hesitated for an instant, then threw back his head, squared his great young shoulders, and looked us in the eyes, while all his embarrassment fled. "I came back to marry Olive Marceau," said he. "I came to take her back home to the little mother."

He stared out wistfully at the distant southern mountains, effulgent and glorified by the midnight sun which lay so close behind their crests, and I winked at Martin.

"She's left—"

"What!" He whirled quickly.

"—the theater, and I don't suppose you can see her until to-morrow."

Disappointment darkened his face.

"Besides," Kink added, gloomily, "when you quit her like a dog I slicked myself up some, and I ain't anyways sure she'll care to see you now—only jest as a friend of mine. Notice I've cut my whiskers, don't you?"

We made Monty pay for that instant's hesitation, the last he ever had, and then I said:

"You walk up the river trail for a quarter of a mile and wait. If I can persuade her to come out at this hour I'll send her to you. No, you couldn't find her. She's moved since you left."

"I wouldn't gamble none on her meetin' you," Martin said, discouragingly, and combed out his new-mown beard with ostentation.

She was up the moment I knocked, and when I said that a man needed help I heard her murmur sympathetically as she dressed. When we came to our tent I stopped her.

"He's up yonder a piece," said I. "You run along while I fetch Kink and the medicine-kit. We'll overtake you."

"Is it anything serious?"

"Yes, it's apt to be unless you hurry. He seems to think he needs you pretty badly."

And so she went up the river trail to where he was waiting, her way golden with the beams of the sun whose rim peeped at her over the far-off hills. And there, in the free, still air, among the virgin spruce, with the clean, sweet moss beneath their feet, they met. The good sun smiled broadly at them now, and the grim Yukon hurried past, chuckling under its banks and swiggering among the roots, while the song it sang was of spring and of long, bright days that had no night.