ipping chechaquos that
Daylight was a man absolutely without fear. But Bettles and Dan
MacDonald and other sourdoughs shook their heads and laughed as they
mentioned women. And they were right. He had always been afraid of
them from the time, himself a lad of seventeen, when Queen Anne, of
Juneau, made open and ridiculous love to him. For that matter, he
never had known women. Born in a mining-camp where they were rare and
mysterious, having no sisters, his mother dying while he was an infant,
he had never been in contact with them. True, running away from Queen
Anne, he had later encountered them on the Yukon and cultivated an
acquaintance with them--the pioneer ones who crossed the passes on the
trail of the men who had opened up the first diggings. But no lamb had
ever walked with a wolf in greater fear and trembling than had he
walked with them. It was a matter of masculine pride that he should
walk with them, and he had done so in fair seeming; but women had
remained to him a closed book, and he preferred a game of solo or
seven-up any time.

And now, known as the King of the Klondike, carrying several other
royal titles, such as Eldorado King, Bonanza King, the Lumber Baron,
and the Prince of the Stampeders, not to omit the proudest appellation
of all, namely, the Father of the Sourdoughs, he was more afraid of
women than ever. As never before they held out their arms to him, and
more women were flocking into the country day by day. It mattered not
whether he sat at dinner in the gold commissioner's house, called for
the drinks in a dancehall, or submitted to an interview from the woman
representative of the New York Sun, one and all of them held out their
arms.

There was one exception, and that was Freda, the girl that danced, and
to whom he had given the flour. She was the only woman in whose
company he felt at ease, for she alone never reached out her arms. And
yet it was from her that he was destined to receive next to his
severest fright. It came about in the fall of 1897. He was returning
from one of his dashes, this time to inspect Henderson, a creek that
entered the Yukon just below the Stewart. Winter had come on with a
rush, and he fought his way down the Yukon seventy miles in a frail
Peterborough canoe in the midst of a run of mush-ice. Hugging the
rim-ice that had already solidly formed, he shot across the ice-spewing
mouth of the Klondike just in time to see a lone man dancing exci