"Will you look at those clothes! Did you ever see such whiteness in clothes before?"
I never had, and I promptly asked Miss Kinney what her laundress did to the clothes to make them look so white.
"I'm the laundress," said she, brusquely. "I come out here from Chicago to work, and I work. I was half dead, clerking in a store, when the Klondike craze come along and swept me off my feet. I struck Dawson broke. I went to work, and I've been at work ever since. I have cooks, and chambermaids, and laundresses; but it often happens that I have to be all three, besides landlady, at once. That's the way of the Klondike. Now, I must go and feed those malamute pups; that little yellow one is getting sassy."
She had almost escaped when I caught her sleeve and detained her.
"But the clothes—I asked you what makes them so white—"
"Don't you suppose," interrupted she, irascibly, "that I have too much work to do to fool around answering the questions of a cheechaco? I'm not travelling down the Yukon for fun!"
This was distinctly discouraging; but I had set out to learn what had made those clothes so white. Besides, I was beginning to perceive dimly that she was not so hard as she spoke herself to be; so I advised her that I should not release her sleeve until she had answered my question.
She burst into a kind of lawless laughter and threw her hand out at me.
"Oh, you! Well, there, then! I never saw your beat! There ain't a thing in them there clothes but soap-suds, renched out, and sunshine. We don't even have to rub clothes up here the way you have to in other places; and we never put in a pinch of blueing. Two-three hours of sunshine makes 'em like snow."
"But how is it in winter?"