She was tall, gentle, genial too, and soon a favorite with her many, many patrons. She had a scar on the left side of her face, they said, reaching from the chin to the cheek; but with a woman's tact, she always kept her right side to her company, and the scar was not always noticed.
What had been her history, what troubles she had had, what tempests she had stood against, or what great storm had blown this solitary woman far into the great black sea of firs that belts about and lies in the shadow of the Sierras, like a lone white sea-dove you sometimes find far out in the China seas, no man knew; and, be it said to the credit of the Forks, no man cared to inquire.
This meeting together, this coming and going of thousands of men from all parts of the earth, where each man stood on the character he made there in a day, deadened curiosity, perhaps.
At all events, you can go, a stranger, to-day, any where along the Pacific, and, if your character indicates the gentleman, you are accepted as such, and no man cares to ask of your antecedents. A convenient thing, I grant, for many; but, nevertheless, a good thing, and a correct thing for any country.
The old Jewish law of every seven years forgiving each man his debt was an age in advance of our laws of to-day; and, if any means could be devised by which every seven years to forgive all men their offences, and let them begin life anew all together, an even start, it would be better still.
How the work did pour in upon this first woman in this wild Eden set with thorns and with thistles! There were not many clothes in the Forks that were worth washing, but the few pieces that were presentable came almost every day to the door of the Widow to be taken in by the little hand that ever opened to the knock of the miners' knuckles on the door, and reached through the partly opened place, and drew back timidly and with scarce a word.
No man had yet entered her cabin. The wise little woman! If one man had been so favored, without good and sufficient reason, then jealousy, unless others had been allowed to enter also, would have made a funeral, and very soon, too, with that one favored man the central figure.
No man had entered that cabin; but a boy had, and oftentime too. In fact from the first little Billie Piper, whose cabin, as I have said, stood hard by, seemed to be as much at home and as much in place with the Widow as he was out of place with the men. The friendship here made him enemies elsewhere. Such is human nature.