“Yes, this whole disturbance is caused by those two. Only for them we’d be all right.”
“Who is Miss Malotte?”
He answered, promptly: “The handsomest woman in the North, and the most dangerous.”
“In what way? Who is she?”
“It’s hard to say who or what she is—she’s different from other women. She came to Dawson in the early days—just came—we didn’t know how, whence, or why, and we never found out. We woke up one morning and there she was. By night we were all jealous, and in a week we were most of us drivelling idiots. It might have been the mystery or, perhaps, the competition. That was the day when a dance-hall girl could make a homestake in a winter or marry a millionaire in a month, but she never bothered. She toiled not, neither did she spin on the waxed floors, yet Solomon in all his glory would have looked like a tramp beside her.”
“You say she is dangerous?”
“Well, there was the young nobleman, in the winter of ’98, Dane, I think—fine family and all that—big, yellow-haired boy. He wanted to marry her, but a faro-dealer shot him. Then there was Rock, of the mounted police, the finest officer in the service. He was cashiered. She knew he was going to pot for her, but she didn’t seem to care—and there were others. Yet, with it all, she is the most generous person and the most tender-hearted. Why, she has fed every ‘stew bum’ on the Yukon, and there isn’t a busted prospector in the country who wouldn’t swear by her, for she has grubstaked dozens of them. I was horribly in love with her myself. Yes, she’s dangerous, all right—to everybody but Glenister.”
“What do you mean?”
“She had been across the Yukon to nurse a man with scurvy, and coming back she was caught in the spring break-up. I wasn’t there, but it seems this Glenister got her ashore somehow when nobody else would tackle the job. They were carried five miles down-stream in the ice-pack before he succeeded.”
“What happened then?”