t Jees Uck's
house and waited. And he continued to wait. She sold her dog-team to a
party of miners and paid cash for her food. And when Thompson refused to
honour even her coin, Toyaat Indians made her purchases, and sledded them
up to her house in the dark.

In February the first post came in over the ice, and John Thompson read
in the society column of a five-months-old paper of the marriage of Neil
Bonner and Kitty Sharon. Jees Uck held the door ajar and him outside
while he imparted the information; and, when he had done, laughed
pridefully and did not believe. In March, and all alone, she gave birth
to a man-child, a brave bit of new life at which she marvelled. And at
that hour, a year later, Neil Bonner sat by another bed, marvelling at
another bit of new life that had fared into the world.

The snow went off the ground and the ice broke out of the Yukon. The sun
journeyed north, and journeyed south again; and, the money from the being
spent, Jees Uck went back to her own people. Oche Ish, a shrewd hunter,
proposed to kill the meat for her and her babe, and catch the salmon, if
she would marry him. And Imego and Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, husky young
hunters all, made similar proposals. But she elected to live alone and
seek her own meat and fish. She sewed moccasins and _parkas_ and
mittens--warm, serviceable things, and pleasing to the eye, withal, what
of the ornamental hair-tufts and bead-work. These she sold to the
miners, who were drifting faster into the land each year. And not only
did she win food that was good and plentiful, but she laid money by, and
one day took passage on the _Yukon Belle_ down the river.

At St. Michael's she washed dishes in the kitchen of the post. The
servants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with the
remarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafed
nothing. But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she bought a
passage south on a strayed sealing schooner. That winter she cooked for
Captain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the spring continued
south to Sitka on a whisky sloop. Later on appeared at Metlakahtla,
which is near to St. Mary's on the end of the Pan-Handle, where she
worked in the cannery through the salmon season. When autumn came and
the Siwash fishermen prepared to return to Puget Sound, she embarked with
a couple of families in a big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the
hazardous chaos of the A