tedly
on the rim and pointing into the water. Next, he saw the fur-clad body
of a woman, face under, sinking in the midst of the driving mush-ice.
A lane opening in the swirl of the current, it was a matter of seconds
to drive the canoe to the spot, reach to the shoulder in the water, and
draw the woman gingerly to the canoe's side. It was Freda. And all
might yet have been well with him, had she not, later, when brought
back to consciousness, blazed at him with angry blue eyes and demanded:
"Why did you? Oh, why did you?"

This worried him. In the nights that followed, instead of sinking
immediately to sleep as was his wont, he lay awake, visioning her face
and that blue blaze of wrath, and conning her words over and over.
They rang with sincerity. The reproach was genuine. She had meant
just what she said. And still he pondered.

The next time he encountered her she had turned away from him angrily
and contemptuously. And yet again, she came to him to beg his pardon,
and she dropped a hint of a man somewhere, sometime,--she said not
how,--who had left her with no desire to live. Her speech was frank,
but incoherent, and all he gleaned from it was that the event, whatever
it was, had happened years before. Also, he gleaned that she had loved
the man.

That was the thing--love. It caused the trouble. It was more terrible
than frost or famine. Women were all very well, in themselves good to
look upon and likable; but along came this thing called love, and they
were seared to the bone by it, made so irrational that one could never
guess what they would do next.

This Freda-woman was a splendid creature, full-bodied, beautiful, and
nobody's fool; but love had come along and soured her on the world,
driving her to the Klondike and to suicide so compellingly that she was
made to hate the man that saved her life.

Well, he had escaped love so far, just as he had escaped smallpox; yet
there it was, as contagious as smallpox, and a whole lot worse in
running its course. It made men and women do such fearful and
unreasonable things. It was like delirium tremens, only worse. And if
he, Daylight, caught it, he might have it as badly as any of them. It
was lunacy, stark lunacy, and contagious on top of it all. A half
dozen young fellows were crazy over Freda. They all wanted to marry
her. Yet she, in turn, was crazy over that some other fellow on the
other side of the world, and would have nothing to do w