isy crowd within. It was snowing outside.
As the door swung open one could see the white sheet of falling flakes
in the darkness; the air was full of snow--that cruel, light, dry snow,
fine and sharp like powdered ice, borne down on a North wind. The
figures that entered brought it in with them, the light frosty powder
resting on their furs and lying deep in the upturned rims of their seal
caps.

There had been a successful strike made that afternoon, and the men were
all excited and eager about it. Every one pressed to the "Pistol Shot"
to hear the latest details, to discuss and gossip over it. There was as
much talk as digging done in Dawson. Men who had no chance and no means
to win success, who owned no claims and never saw gold except in another
man's hands, loved to talk work and talk claims and talk gold with the
rest. It was exhilarating and exciting, and there was only that one
topic in the world for them. They were like invalids in a small
community afflicted by a common disease who never meet without
discussing their symptoms. They were all invalids in reality, all
suffering from the same horrible plague and fever, the gold fever that
was eating into their brains.

At one end of the bar counter, between it and the back wall, a girl was
standing idly surveying with indifferent eyes the animated crowd that
moved and swayed round her, the men jostling each other in their efforts
to push up to the thickly surrounded counter. She was tall rather than
short, and her figure well made, showing good lines even in the rough
dress she was wearing; long rubber boots came to her knees, where they
met her short buckskin skirt, and above this, in place of bodice, she
wore merely a rough straight jacket drawn into the waist by a broad
leather belt, in which was stuck, not ostentatiously but still
sufficiently conspicuously a brace of revolvers. Her hair was cut short,
and only a few dark silky rings showed themselves beneath the edge of
her sealskin cap, pushed down close to her dark eyebrows. The dark eyes
beneath looked out upon the scene before her with a half-disdainful,
half-wearied expression which deepened into scorn now and then as she
watched the bar-tender rake over the counter double and three times the
price of a drink in the generous pinch of gold dust laid there by some
miner almost too drunk to stagger to the bar. She had a very attractive
face, to which one's eyes would wander again and again trying to
reco