erwise. "We've got to make this thing go," he
said to Captain Alexander, and Captain Alexander said that he was
unaccustomed to backing out.

Mrs. Schoville emitted preliminary thunders, marshalled the other
women, and became chronically seismic and unsafe.

Lucile went nowhere save to Frona's. But Jacob Welse, who rarely went
anywhere, was often to be found by Colonel Trethaway's fireside, and
not only was he to be found there, but he usually brought somebody
along. "Anything on hand this evening?" he was wont to say on casual
meeting. "No? Then come along with me." Sometimes he said it with
lamb-like innocence, sometimes with a challenge brooding under his
bushy brows, and rarely did he fail to get his man. These men had
wives, and thus were the germs of dissolution sown in the ranks of the
opposition.

Then, again, at Colonel Trethaway's there was something to be found
besides weak tea and small talk; and the correspondents, engineers, and
gentlemen rovers kept the trail well packed in that direction, though
it was the Kings, to a man, who first broke the way. So the Trethaway
cabin became the centre of things, and, backed commercially,
financially, and officially, it could not fail to succeed socially.

The only bad effect of all this was to make the lives of Mrs. Schoville
and divers others of her sex more monotonous, and to cause them to lose
faith in certain hoary and inconsequent maxims. Furthermore, Captain
Alexander, as highest official, was a power in the land, and Jacob
Welse was the Company, and there was a superstition extant concerning
the unwisdom of being on indifferent terms with the Company. And the
time was not long till probably a bare half-dozen remained in outer
cold, and they were considered a warped lot, anyway.

CHAPTER XXII

Quite an exodus took place in Dawson in the spring. Men, because they
had made stakes, and other men, because they had made none, bought up
the available dogs and rushed out for Dyea over the last ice.
Incidentally, it was discovered that Dave Harney possessed most of
these dogs.

"Going out?" Jacob Welse asked him on a day when the meridian sun for
the first time felt faintly warm to the naked skin.

"Well, I calkilate not. I'm clearin' three dollars a pair on the
moccasins I cornered, to say nothing but saw wood on the boots. Say,
Welse, not that my nose is out of joint, but you jest cinched me
everlastin' on sugar, didn't you?"

Jacob Wels