sch's drudge for good.'

I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while
Lena Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the
leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave
her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her
business and had got on in the world.

Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely
of Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people
to think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters
that used to stop at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the
waterfront in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business
in one of his empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors'
lodging-house. This, everyone said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if
she had begun by running a decent place, she couldn't keep it up; all
sailors' boarding-houses were alike.

When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as
well as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about
the dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big trayful of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce travelling men, and contemptuously
at the scrubby ones--who were so afraid of her that they didn't dare
to ask for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the
sailors, too, might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we should have
been, as we sat talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if
we could have known what her future was really to be! Of all the girls
and boys who grew up together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead
the most adventurous life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.

This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring, which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out
for Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm,
went in dog-sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, an