had gone into the room an unsophisticated girl—she came out from it a woman—but, a woman whose spirit, instead of being crushed and broken by the weight of her shame, rose triumphant and defiant above that shame. For in her heart was bitter hatred against the white men, whose code of ethics brought shame upon the innocent head of one whose very existence was due to the lust of a man of their own race.
Silently the girl crossed the clearing to the building in which was her room, and very silently she made up a pack of her belongings. Then, taking the pack, and her rifle, she stole silently out the door and crossing the broad open space, entered the bush. At the edge of the clearing she turned, and stood for a long time looking back at the mission with its little buildings huddled together in the moonlight. And then, with a choking sob that forced itself past her tight-pressed lips, she turned and plunged into the timber.
CHAPTER IV
ACE-IN-THE-HOLE
On the outskirts of Dawson, city of the tents and log buildings, Brent pitched his own tent, paid off his Indian canoeman, and within the hour was sucked into the mad maelstrom of carousal that characterized the early days of the big gold camp.
It was the city of men gone mad. The saloon was the center of activity—and saloons there were aplenty; Dick Stoell's Place, which was "the big game" of Dawson; "The Nugget" of uproarious fame; Cuter Malone's "Klondike Palace," where, nightly, revel raged to the nth power—where bearded men and scarlet women gave over to debauch magnificent in its wild abandon; and many others, each with its wheels of chance, its cards, its music, and its women.
And into the whirl of it Carter Brent plunged with a zest born of youth and of muscles iron-hard from the gruelling trail. And into it he fitted as though to the manner born. No invisible lines of demarkation divided the bars of Dawson as they had divided Kelliher's bar. Millionaires in blanket
coats and mukluks rubbed shoulders with penniless watery-eyed squaw-men. Sourdoughs who spilled coarse gold from the mouths of sacks, misfit chechakos, and painted women, danced, and sang, and cursed, and gambled, the short nights through.
The remnant of Brent's thousand dollars was but a drop in the bucket, and he was glad when it was gone three days after his arrival. Not that he particularly wanted to be "broke." But in the spending of it, men had taken his measure—the bills and the coined gold had branded him as a man from the "outside," a chechako—a tenderfoot.
An hour after he had tossed his last yellow disk upon the bar in payment for a round of drinks he had hired out to Camillo Bill Waters to sluice gravel at an ounce a day. An ounce was sixteen dollars. Thereafter for the space of a month he was seen no more in Dawson.