Setting around the fire that night I found that she’d just lost another of her famous lawsuits—­claimed she owned a fraction ’longside of No. 20, Buster Creek, and that the Lund boys had changed their stakes so as to take in her ground.  During the winter they’d opened up a hundred and fifty feet of awful rich pay right next to her line, and she’d raised the devil.  Injunctions, hearings and appeals, and now she was coming back, swearing she’d been “jobbed,” the judge had been bought, and the jury corrupted.

“It’s the richest strike in the district,” says she.  “They’ve rocked out $11,000 since snow flew, and there’s 30,000 buckets of dirt on the dump.  They can bribe and bulldoze a decision through this court, but I’ll have that fraction yet, the robbers.”

“Robbers be cussed,” speaks up the mail man.  “You’re the cause of the trouble yourself.  If you don’t get a square deal, it’s your own fault—­always looking for technicalities in the mining laws.  It’s been your game from the start to take advantage of your skirts, what there is of ’em, and jump, jump, jump.  Nobody believes half you say.  You’re a natural disturber, and if you was a man you’d have been hung long ago.”

I’ve heard her oral formations, and I looked for his epidermis to shrivel when she got her replications focused.  She just soared up and busted.

“Look out for the stick,” thinks I.

“Woman, am I,” she says, musical as a bum gramophone under the slow bell.  “I take advantage of my skirts, do I?  Who are you, you mangy ‘malamoot,’ to criticise a lady?  I’m more of a man than you, you tin-horn; I want no favours; I do a man’s work; I live a man’s life; I am a man, and I’m proud of it, but you—­; Nome’s full of your kind; you need a woman to support you; you’re a protoplasm, a polyp.  Those Swedes changed their stakes to cover my fraction.  I know it, they know it, and if it wasn’t Alaska, God would know it, but He won’t be in again till spring, and then the season’s only three months long.  I’ve worked like a man, suffered like a man—­”

“Why don’t ye’ lose like a man?” says he.

“I will, and I’ll fight like one, too,” says she, while her eyes burned like faggots.  “They’ve torn away the reward of years of work and agony, and they forget I can hate like a man.”

She was stretched up to high C, where her voice drowned the howl of the storm, and her seamed old face was a sight.  I’ve seen mild, shrinky, mouse-shy women ’roused to hell’s own fury, and I felt that night that here was a bad enemy for the Swedes of Buster Creek.

She stopped, listening.

“What’s that?  There’s some one at the door.”

“Nonsense,” says one of the freighters.  “You do so much knocking you can hear the echo.”

“There’s some one at that door,” says she.

“If there was, they’d come in,” says Joe.

“Couldn’t be, this late in this storm,” I adds.