Jim had made good! Jim was returning home! He was crazy to be with her and his sister Claire again. Oh, it was good, so good! The woman’s brown eyes were raised smiling whimsically at the sudden thought which her mood had inspired. Why, it was all so good that she would almost joyfully accept whatever offer Bad Booker might make for their last block of real estate in the city of Beacon Glory, which now represented their entire resources for the coming winter. Yes, never in her life had she been so thrilled. Never!
She remembered earlier thrills. She remembered those hard times when they had been well-nigh confronted with starvation. She remembered how her husband, that headlong gambler, had set out to the gaming tables of Beacon Glory with their last remaining dollars in his pocket. And she had sat at home with her half-fed children awaiting his return. Then the joy of his return with pockets bulging—yes, those had been great moments. But then he was a skilful gambler and rarely failed. This—this was something on a different plane. Something——
Her contemplative gaze had discovered movement on the hillside across the water. It was a horse-drawn vehicle moving rapidly, descending the precipitate slope diagonally at the break of the forest which gave way to the bald, wind-swept crest above. Its course would bring it down to the far side of the ford of the river directly opposite where she was standing.
Her smile deepened. It needed no second thought to tell her whose vehicle it was. Ivor McLagan, the oil man from the Alsek River, was on his way into Beacon Glory, which lay ten miles or so to the northeast of her home.
She awaited his arrival. He was a welcome enough visitor at all times. And he never failed to call in on his way, and leave her any newspapers he might chance to have. He was wealthy, and a man everybody esteemed. She had sometimes hoped—— But she knew that could never be. Claire was a girl of strong decision for all she was only twenty-one. She had already definitely refused to marry him. She liked him well enough. They all liked him. Especially had Jim liked him, but it was her woman’s understanding of the position that made her fear that Claire’s frank regard would never deepen to anything warmer.
The buckboard seemed to be almost falling down the precipitous slope under the man’s reckless handling. It was literally plunging headlong, but she understood—she knew. It was McLagan’s way with his Alaskan bronchos. There would be no disaster. And as she watched his progress she wanted to laugh, for such was the lightness of her mood.
The buckboard rattled, and shook, and jolted as it bustled down the hillside over a broken almost undefined trail. Its surefooted, well-fed team was utterly untiring. The shaggy creatures made no mistakes. Tough, hardy, they were bred to just such work as this, and they were in the hands of a super-teamster. So the creek came up to them with a rush and they plunged belly deep into the chill water of the ford. Then, moments later, they were reined in sharply at the door of the man’s familiar stopping place.
“Say, ma’am, this country’s one hell of a proposition for a quiet, decent, comfort-loving, ordinary sort of engineer.”
The man’s greeting was full of cheer, and his smiling eyes conveyed a quiet sense of dry humour. Ivor McLagan had no claims to good looks, and his manner ordinarily was sufficiently brusque to border on rudeness, but in this woman’s presence he had a way of displaying a side to his character that those who met him in business, those of his own sex, were never admitted to. No, McLagan had nothing in face or feature to thrill any woman’s artist soul, but what he lacked in that direction he made up in another. As he turned his buckboard wheels and leapt to the ground, he towered over the little woman in the doorway a figure of magnificent manhood.