Well, she had saved him, saved his good name, if not his neck, and his life was hers.  Who was she?  What mission brought her here?  What hurry crowded on her heels?  What idle chance had flung them into each other’s arms?  Or was it idle chance?  Was there such a thing as chance, after all?  Were not men’s random fortunes all laid out in conformity with some obscure purpose to form a part of some intricate design?  Dust he was, dust blown upon the breath of the North, as were these other human atoms which had been borne thither from the farthest quarters of the earth; but when that dust had settled would it not arrange itself into patterns mapped out at the hour of birth or long before?  Somehow he believed that such would be the case.

As for the Countess, his way was hers, her way was his; he could not bear to think of losing her.  She was big, she was great, she drew him by the spell of some strange magic.

The peppery old man who, with Doret’s help, had defied the miners’ meeting approached him to inquire: 

“Say, why didn’t old Tom come back with you from Linderman?”

“Old Tom?”

“Sure!  Old Tom Linton.  We’re pardners.  I’m Jerry Quirk.”

“He was tired out.”

“Tired!” Mr. Quirk snorted derisively.  “What tired him?  He can’t tote enough grub to satisfy his own hunger.  Me, I’m double-trippin’—­relayin’ our stuff to the Summit and breakin’ my back at it.  I can’t make him understand we’d ought to keep the outfit together; he’s got it scattered like a mad woman’s hair.  But old Tom’s in the sere and yellow leaf:  he’s onnery. like all old men.  I try to humor him, but—­here’s a limit.”  The speaker looked Pierce over shrewdly.  “You said you was packin’ for wages.  Well, old Tom ain’t any help to me.  You look strong.  Mebbe I could hire you.”

Phillips shook his head.  “I don’t want work just now,” said he. 
“I’m going to Dyea in the morning.”

Jim McCaskey was buried where he had fallen, and there beside the trail, so that all who passed might read and ponder, the men of Sheep Camp raised a board with this inscription: 

“Here lies the body of a thief.”

CHAPTER VI

A certain romantic glamour attaches to all new countries, but not every man is responsive to it.  To the person who finds enjoyment, preoccupation, in studying a ruin or in contemplating glories, triumphs, dramas long dead and gone, old buildings, old cities, and old worlds sound a resistless call.  The past is peopled with impressive figures, to be sure; it is a tapestry into which are woven scenes of tremendous significance and events of the greatest moment, and it is quite natural, therefore, that the majority of people should experience greater fascination in studying it than in painting new scenes upon a naked canvas with colors of their own imagining.  To them new countries are crude, uninteresting.  But there