Her voice died before the Indian's fixed regard. "No squaw say to me, Mush! Get up, there! like dog. Mush! Lie down like dog. Me damn high muckamuck Skukum chief!" Wrapping more closely about him the blanket that, with a boiled shirt and store trousers, formed his costume, he re-entered the mission with the unsurpassable dignity of his race.
Evelyn rose without a glance in the direction of Scarlett, who had rejoined them. "Come, Sarah. Thank you very much for all your good offices, Mr. Maclane. I anticipate the suggestion you and the Sergeant are obviously about to make: that I cook, wash, scrub, sew for myself."
"Considering the conditions of camp life, my dear, it might be wise," acquiesced the minister, as he shook hands.
"Just for a lark, ye know," murmured Scarlett, pacifically, saluting. But though her pretty lip trembled, Evelyn held her head high and passed him without a sign.
VII
PEACE, PERFECT PEACE
Feeling that on her father's return she could requite the obligation a thousandfold, Evelyn consented to remain with her party as guests of Perdu's Grand Hotel while the shack at Lost Shoe Creek was being made ready for their tenancy.
Perdu, lying on a large lake of the same name, is port of entry, and base of supplies, to the goldfields beyond. Being at that time in the third year of its existence it had a highly developed social and commercial life. For in its initial season a camp is likely to be a bedlam of frenzied maniacs shrieking, Gold, gold, gold! The second season witnesses a slump proportioned to the inflated values of its predecessor. But if it weathers to a third, then some sort of poise is attained, as steady industries develop and existence seeks a normal plane. The fancy-women who flock wherever the nuggets are thickest, now segregate themselves in a secluded quarter of the township; married men send for their families, while the unblessed bachelor whistles "The Girl I Left Behind Me," or pays attention to the schoolteacher. On all sides one sees the effort, sometimes pitiful, always human and worthy, from the harsh matrix of the wilderness to wrest a home. And then follow the petty complexities of a miscalled civilization. To Evelyn's surprise, after the first warm tender of hospitality, she encountered the same restricted social conditions in Perdu that obtain in villages on the "outside," as the world beyond the mountains in northern latitudes is termed. Women left cards on her; heads of rival cliques warned her one against the other; the wife of the principal grocer planned a tea in her honor.
On a brilliant summer morning, without cloud or shadow, mountains and valleys alike lying exposed to a broadside of sun that had been warming to its work since four hours after midnight, Evelyn set out to return the visit of the town surveyor's wife. A short cut through the clustered willow bushes brought her to the back door of their cabin, where she came upon the hostess at her washtubs, while from the doorstep the town surveyor was cleaning his teeth publicly. Wholly unembarrassed, the good people greeted their visitor with cordiality, and conducted her into the living-room, where babies, cot beds and cooking commingled with such observances of decency and taste as a woman of refinement, no matter how overworked, seems somehow generally able to contrive. In point of cultivation, so Evelyn soon discovered, her new acquaintances were fully her equal. Delighted as they professed themselves to be that her stay would be of long duration, yet to the plans she outlined for her projected improvement of the district they showed an almost marked indifference. When she dropped hints about the free library she intended to establish, Mr. Grayson began quite inappositely to brag of having made more money the previous winter by lumbering than in the way of his profession, owing to the fact that "up here, thank God! no one, man or woman, loses caste by honest labor of any sort." When she alluded to the art furniture she thought of importing for her domicile, Mrs. Grayson cautioned her to be very careful of her lamp chimneys, the commonest kind costing fifty cents at local stores, because, so the storekeepers said, of the exorbitant freight rates that prevailed. Also she advised Evelyn to start right in and do her own washing, as the local laundries charged something over four dollars for a dozen simple pieces. When Miss Durant mentioned the theatre she was arranging to have built, the opera troupe with which she already was negotiating for a series of performances to beguile the long Klondike winter, the Graysons merely said, almost with sarcasm, "How nice!" adding that the camp contrived to get up some fair entertainments of its own in the hall over the truckman's stable. Coming to the conclusion that they were jealous lest her advent should undermine the social prestige which, so Hastie had informed her, they enjoyed, Evelyn rose to take her leave and, kindly wishful to put them at their ease, admired the babies, the bearskin rugs, the horns of mountain sheep and goat upon the wall, the view, the two geraniums in pots upon the window-sill; accepted an invitation to a wild-strawberry picnic, offered to teach them bridge, and departed in a glow of self-gratulation at her tact in dealing with the envious and small-minded.