rifle, and many
echoes broke the silence. Hardly had they died away when other rifles
spoke in the distance. Sitka Charley started.

There had been more than one shot, yet there was but one other rifle in
the party.

He gave a fleeting glance at the men who lay so quietly, smiled
viciously at the wisdom of the trail, and hurried on to meet the men of
the Yukon.

The Wife of a King

Once when the northland was very young, the social and civic virtues
were remarkably alike for their paucity and their simplicity. When the
burden of domestic duties grew grievous, and the fireside mood expanded
to a constant protest against its bleak loneliness, the adventurers
from the Southland, in lieu of better, paid the stipulated prices and
took unto themselves native wives. It was a foretaste of Paradise to
the women, for it must be confessed that the white rovers gave far
better care and treatment of them than did their Indian copartners. Of
course, the white men themselves were satisfied with such deals, as
were also the Indian men for that matter. Having sold their daughters
and sisters for cotton blankets and obsolete rifles and traded their
warm furs for flimsy calico and bad whisky, the sons of the soil
promptly and cheerfully succumbed to quick consumption and other swift
diseases correlated with the blessings of a superior civilization.

It was in these days of Arcadian simplicity that Cal Galbraith
journeyed through the land and fell sick on the Lower River. It was a
refreshing advent in the lives of the good Sisters of the Holy Cross,
who gave him shelter and medicine; though they little dreamed of the
hot elixir infused into his veins by the touch of their soft hands and
their gentle ministrations. Cal Galbraith, became troubled with strange
thoughts which clamored for attention till he laid eyes on the Mission
girl, Madeline. Yet he gave no sign, biding his time patiently. He
strengthened with the coming spring, and when the sun rode the heavens
in a golden circle, and the joy and throb of life was in all the land,
he gathered his still weak body together and departed.

Now, Madeline, the Mission girl, was an orphan. Her white father had
failed to give a bald-faced grizzly the trail one day, and had died
quickly. Then her Indian mother, having no man to fill the winter
cache, had tried the hazardous experiment of waiting till the
salmon-run on fifty pounds of flour and half as many of bacon. After
that, the ba