I ever
seen your pard put a hand to the spade. He seems to live in that darned
tent. I seen him twice hiking out--to Dawson, for a jag, I guess. Didn't
seem on the level to me----"

Jim's mouth twitched. He had no doubt about the veracity of this
statement. Someone had been visiting Angela, and she had said nothing of
it.

"Didn't know he went to Dawson," he replied evasively. "Thanks for the
information. I'll sure talk to him about it."

They nodded and began to pole down the creek and out into the river. Jim
sat down on a pile of muck and mopped his brow. The tent was approachable
from the river on the other side of the bluff. The spruce-trees that
surrounded it hid it from the view of one working by the creek, though any
occupant would have the advantage of seeing without being seen. He
remembered reaching the tent a few days before, to find Angela singularly
embarrassed. Was that the day on which the stranger had called? Despite
his heartache he could think no wrong of her. She was lonely, pining for
the life she had left. Between him and her loomed an apparently
unbridgeable gulf. If she had found a friend in that mixed crowd back in
Dawson, hadn't she a right to see him and speak with him? His heart
answered in the affirmative, but it hurt just the same.

He said nothing to Angela on the subject, but carried on with his
thankless task, with a strange mixture of pride and jealousy eating into
his heart. When more wood was needed he innocently(?) hewed down two
spruce-trees in close proximity to the tent, whose removal afforded him a
view of the tent entrance from the scene of his daily "grind."

For a whole week he kept his eyes intermittently on the brown bell-tent,
but the stranger came not. He wondered if Angela had become aware of the
increased vision afforded him by the felled trees, and was careful to keep
her strange friend away. He noticed some slight change in her
disposition--a queer light in her eye and a mocking ring in the
monosyllabic replies which she gave to any questions he found it necessary
to put to her.

Their conversation had not improved with time. If he addressed her at all
it was with reference to the domestic arrangements. She, on her part,
never interrogated him on any subject. Every movement of her lips, and of
her body, made it clear that she regarded him as a complete stranger under
whose jailership certain circumstances had placed her. Her determination
was scarcely less than h