The Yukon Trail | Page 2

country, one not likely to be
over-welcome when it became known what his mission was. It may
have been because he was out of the picture himself that he resented a
little the exclusion of the young woman with the magazine. Certainly
she herself gave no evidence of feeling about it. Her long-lashed eyes
looked dreamily across the river to the glowing hills beyond. Not once
did they turn with any show of interest to the lively party under the
awning.
From where he was leaning against the deckhouse Elliot could see only
a fine, chiseled profile shading into a mass of crisp, black hair, but
some quality in the detachment of her personality stimulated gently his
imagination. He wondered who she could be. His work had taken him

to frontier camps before, but he could not place her as a type. The best
he could do was to guess that she might be the daughter of some
territorial official on her way in to join him.
A short, thick-set man who had ridden down on the stage with Elliot to
Pierre's Portage drifted along the deck toward him. He wore the
careless garb of a mining man in a country which looks first to comfort.
"Bound for Kusiak?" he asked, by way of opening conversation.
"Yes," answered Gordon.
The miner nodded toward the group under the awning. "That bunch
lives at Kusiak. They've got on at different places the last two or three
days--except Selfridge and his wife, they've been out. Guess you can
tell that from hearing her talk--the little woman in red with the snappy
black eyes. She's spillin' over with talk about the styles in New York
and the cabarets and the new shows. That pot-bellied little fellow in the
checked suit is Selfridge. He is Colby Macdonald's man Friday."
Elliot took in with a quickened interest the group bound for Kusiak. He
had noticed that they monopolized as a matter of course the best places
on the deck and in the dining-room. They were civil enough to
outsiders, but their manner had the unconscious selfishness that often
regulates social activities. It excluded from their gayety everybody that
did not belong to the proper set.
"That sort of thing gets my goat," the miner went on sourly. "Those
women over there have elected themselves Society with a capital S.
They put on all the airs the Four Hundred do in New York. And who
the hell are they anyhow?--wives to a bunch of grafting politicians
mostly."
From the casual talk that had floated to him, with its many little
allusions punctuating the jolly give-and-take of their repartee, Elliot
guessed that their lives had the same background of tennis, dinners,
hops, official gossip, and business. They evidently knew one another
with the intimacy that comes only to the segment of a small community

shut off largely from the world and forced into close social relations.
No doubt they had loaned each other money occasionally, stood by in
trouble, and gossiped back and forth about their shortcomings and
family skeletons even as society on the outside does.
"That's the way of the world, isn't it? Our civilization is built on the
group system," suggested Elliot.
"Maybeso," grumbled the miner. "But I hate to see Alaska come to it.
Me, I saw this country first in '97--packed an outfit in over the Pass.
Every man stood on his own hind legs then. He got there if he was
strong--mebbe; he bogged down on the trail good and plenty if he was
weak. We didn't have any of the artificial stuff then. A man had to have
the guts to stand the gaff."
"I suppose it was a wild country, Mr. Strong."
The little miner's eyes gleamed. "Best country in the world. We didn't
stand for anything that wasn't on the level. It was a poor man's
country--wages fifteen dollars a day and plenty of work. Everybody
had a chance. Anybody could stake a claim and gamble on his luck.
Now the big corporations have slipped in and grabbed the best. It ain't a
prospector's proposition any more. Instead of faro banks we've got
savings banks. The wide-open dance hall has quit business in favor of
moving pictures. And, as I said before, we've got Society."
"All frontier countries have to come to it."
"Hmp! In the days I'm telling you about that crowd there couldn't 'a'
hustled meat to fill their bellies three meals. Parasites, that's what they
are. They're living off that bunch of roughnecks down there and folks
like 'em."
With a wave of his hand Strong pointed to a group of miners who had
boarded the boat with them at Pierre's Portage. There were about a
dozen of the men, for the most part husky, heavy-set foreigners. They