Mollie goes often these days to look for foxes and to shoot ptarmigan, taking with her a dog-team, and a native boy or two with their guns. When it is bright and sunny, I take the two little children out in the fur robes on the sled, with a native to push the latter, and I enjoy the outing fully as well as they. Jennie is put to bed again on her return, and the weight—a sand bag—attached to her foot, according to the doctor's orders.
The weather is very springlike, and we have wind "emeliktuk," as little Charlie says when he has a plenty of anything. Snow storms are sandwiched nicely in between, but many "mushers" are on the trails. Mollie gets now and then a fox, either white or crossed, and one day she brought in a black one.
Liquor is doing its fiendish work in camp each hour of the twenty-four. Some are going rapidly down the broad road to destruction; a few turn their backs upon it, and seek the straighter way. Some half dozen of the men headed by Sim and Bub are drinking heavily most of the time, gambling between spells for the money with which to buy the poison.
Very late one night a party of drunken men pounded with their fists upon my door.
"She's in—hic—there, boys," said one of the men in a halting way customary with tipplers.
"Bust in the door!" blurted another.
"Drive her out'n here, Bub, ye fool!" yawned another, almost too sleepy for utterance.
In the meantime I lay perfectly still. Not a sound escaped me, for although my heart beat like a sledge hammer, and I was trembling all over, I knew it was best not to speak. After a little more parleying they all went off to finish their "spree" elsewhere. Next day I reported the affair to the captain, who, with his wife, in their ground floor apartments in the farther end of the building, had not heard the noise of the night before. Of course the men were now furious, denying everything, calling me a "liar," ad infinitum.
A fine-looking young man, a dentist and doctor, claiming to come from an eastern city, while sitting at the table last evening, after much insane gibberish, fell back intoxicated upon the floor, and lay insensible for some time. He was finally, when the others had finished eating, dragged off to bed in a most inglorious condition, to suffer later for his dissipation. O, how my heart ached for his dear old mother so far away! If she had seen him as I saw him, I think she would have died. It is better for her to believe him dead than to know the truth.