ng 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 w