part and St. Vincent thrust heavily backward. He
staggered for a couple of yards and almost fell. Then the scene of the
cabin was repeated. Bella cowered and grovelled in the muck, and her
lord towered wrathfully over her.

"Look you," he said in stifled gutturals, turning to St. Vincent. "You
sleep in my cabin and you cook. That is enough. Let my woman alone."

Things went on after that as though nothing had happened; St. Vincent
gave Bella a wide berth and seemed to have forgotten her existence.
But the Swedes went back to their end of the island, laughing at the
trivial happening which was destined to be significant.

CHAPTER XXIII

Spring, smiting with soft, warm hands, had come like a miracle, and now
lingered for a dreamy spell before bursting into full-blown summer.
The snow had left the bottoms and valleys and nestled only on the north
slopes of the ice-scarred ridges. The glacial drip was already in
evidence, and every creek in roaring spate. Each day the sun rose
earlier and stayed later. It was now chill day by three o'clock and
mellow twilight at nine. Soon a golden circle would be drawn around
the sky, and deep midnight become bright as high noon. The willows and
aspens had long since budded, and were now decking themselves in
liveries of fresh young green, and the sap was rising in the pines.

Mother nature had heaved her waking sigh and gone about her brief
business. Crickets sang of nights in the stilly cabins, and in the
sunshine mosquitoes crept from out hollow logs and snug crevices among
the rocks,--big, noisy, harmless fellows, that had procreated the year
gone, lain frozen through the winter, and were now rejuvenated to buzz
through swift senility to second death. All sorts of creeping,
crawling, fluttering life came forth from the warming earth and
hastened to mature, reproduce, and cease. Just a breath of balmy air,
and then the long cold frost again--ah! they knew it well and lost no
time. Sand martins were driving their ancient tunnels into the soft
clay banks, and robins singing on the spruce-garbed islands. Overhead
the woodpecker knocked insistently, and in the forest depths the
partridge boom-boomed and strutted in virile glory.

But in all this nervous haste the Yukon took no part. For many a
thousand miles it lay cold, unsmiling, dead. Wild fowl, driving up
from the south in wind-jamming wedges, halted, looked vainly for open
water, and quested dauntlessly on