very turn of the trail, and she
trained her vision so that she saw in the landscape, not the obvious, but
the concealed. She, who had never cooked in her life, learned to make
bread without the mediation of hops, yeast, or baking-powder, and to bake
bread, top and bottom, in a frying-pan before an open fire. And when the
last cup of flour was gone and the last rind of bacon, she was able to
rise to the occasion, and of moccasins and the softer-tanned bits of
leather in the outfit to make a grub-stake substitute that somehow held a
man's soul in his body and enabled him to stagger on. She learned to
pack a horse as well as a man,--a task to break the heart and the pride
of any city-dweller, and she knew how to throw the hitch best suited for
any particular kind of pack. Also, she could build a fire of wet wood in
a downpour of rain and not lose her temper. In short, in all its guises
she mastered the unexpected. But the Great Unexpected was yet to come
into her life and put its test upon her.

The gold-seeking tide was flooding northward into Alaska, and it was
inevitable that Hans Nelson and his wife should he caught up by the
stream and swept toward the Klondike. The fall of 1897 found them at
Dyea, but without the money to carry an outfit across Chilcoot Pass and
float it down to Dawson. So Hans Nelson worked at his trade that winter
and helped rear the mushroom outfitting-town of Skaguay.

He was on the edge of things, and throughout the winter he heard all
Alaska calling to him. Latuya Bay called loudest, so that the summer of
1898 found him and his wife threading the mazes of the broken coast-line
in seventy-foot Siwash canoes. With them were Indians, also three other
men. The Indians landed them and their supplies in a lonely bight of
land a hundred miles or so beyond Latuya Bay, and returned to Skaguay;
but the three other men remained, for they were members of the organized
party. Each had put an equal share of capital into the outfitting, and
the profits were to be divided equally. In that Edith Nelson undertook
to cook for the outfit, a man's share was to be her portion.

First, spruce trees were cut down and a three-room cabin constructed. To
keep this cabin was Edith Nelson's task. The task of the men was to
search for gold, which they did; and to find gold, which they likewise
did. It was not a startling find, merely a low-pay placer where long
hours of severe toil earned each man between f