she was first opened up."

The girl scarcely heard. She was thinking of the weary, consumptive
young time-keeper who had struggled up that gray slope with daily
weakening tread and of the girl who, with her baby in her arms, watched
him perhaps from the door of one of those dilapidated, weather-worn
shacks upon which she herself now gazed. With blurred eyes, the
erstwhile Willa Murdaugh turned to her informant.

"Have there been many changes since you came?" she asked.

"Well, no," he considered. "Once in a while some hustler from the
Coast lands here and runs up a concrete store, but usually he don't
stay long; there ain't enough doing. The population's always shifting;
there's been a whole new outfit up at the mine since we come, but
everything seems to go on just the same, so you couldn't rightly call
it much of a change. The moving-picture houses are about all that's
marked any difference in things here, I guess."

"I wonder if there is anyone left in the town who was here fifteen
years ago." Willa spoke with ill-concealed eagerness. "Who is the
oldest inhabitant you know of?"

The proprietor looked his surprise.

"Well," he began at last, "there's Bill Ryder; he come in with the
first rush, they tell me, and he still runs the Red Dog Cafe. Then
there's Pete Haines, a half-witted old cuss--begging your pardon,
Ma'am!--that's got enough dust cached somewhere to keep himself drunk
perpetual; and the Widow Atkinson, and Big Olaf, and--and Klondike
Kate."

He hesitated at the last name, and a brick-red flush suffused his
stolid face, but Willa paid no heed.

"Who are they?"

"The Widow Atkinson runs the eating-house for miners at the end of the
street; hard-shell temperance, she is, and they say Atkinson used to
wait on table with her apron tied round him and dassent even smoke
indoors." He paused. "Big Olaf is a Swede who got hurt in the mine
years ago and the company gives him an annuity. Kind of cracked he is,
too, but harmless. You see, Ma'am, when the big boom died down gradual
and the town settled into a one-horse gait, the young folks naturally
pushed on to the next strike that promised a fortune, and the old ones
drifted back to where they come from."

"And Klondike Kate; who is she?" Willa persisted.

Her host shifted from one foot to the other in an agony of
embarrassment.

"She--she's just a woman that stays on here because there ain't any
other place for her to go, Ma'am. She do