“But why didn’t you tell her—”
“Told her everything. Water on a duck’s back.”
“But what did she say?”
“‘Women have done it before.’”
“It’s not true!” cried Cheviot, jumping up. “The world has never seen anything comparable to what this year’s rush to Nome will be. The mob that will be going—”
“She quotes the Klondike, ‘That was worse,’ she says, ‘yet there were women among the men who got there, lived there, and came home.’ Damn it! it’s true, you know!”
“It isn’t true. The Klondike was a totally different proposition. The people who got to the Klondike the year of the rush were all picked men—a few women, yes, I admit, a few women—God help them. But the mob—a rascally crew enough, lots of them—but they were men of some means, men of brawn and muscle and mighty purpose or, simply, they didn’t survive. If they weren’t like that, they turned back as thousands did, from Juneau, from Skagway, from Dyea—or they fell out a little further on. Didn’t I see them on the Dalton trail and the Chilcoot Pass, glad to lie down and die? I tell you, only the hardiest attempted it, and only the toughest survived. That’s the sort of pioneer that peopled the Klondike. Nome’s another story. Nome’s accessible by sea. Any wastrel who can raise the paltry price of his passage can reach the American gold-fields. Any family disgrace can be got rid of cheap by shipping him to Nome. Any creature who’s failed at everything else under the sun has this last chance left. Be sure he’ll go to Nome—with Hildegarde! Good God! Drunkards, sharpers, men—and women, too (oh, yes, that sort!), and people hovering on the border line of crime or well beyond it—they’ll fill the north-bound ships. Hildegarde alone with such a crew!” Cheviot jumped to his feet. “I’d infinitely rather a sister of mine were struggling with a pack on her back over the Chilcoot Pass along with the Klondike men of ’97, than see her shut up on board a ship with the horde that will go to Nome.”
He walked up and down the little inner office, his eyes bright with anger and with fear. And he added terrors not to be put before the girl herself, but for the mother, if Hildegarde should be obdurate. “Make her understand that Nome this summer will be the dump-heap of the world.”