“Why don’t you get the troops?” ventured Voorhees.

“If there’s one thing I want to avoid, it’s soldiers, either here or at the mines.  When they step in, we step out, and I’m not ready for that just yet.”  The receiver smiled sinisterly.

Helen meanwhile had fled to her room, and there received Glenister’s note through Cherry Malotte’s messenger.  It rekindled her worst fears and bore out McNamara’s prophecy.  The more she read of it the more certain she grew that the crisis was only a question of hours, and that with darkness, Tragedy would walk the streets of Nome.  The thought of the wrong already done was lost in the lonely girl’s terror of the crime about to happen, for it seemed to her she had been the instrument to set these forces in motion, that she had loosed this swift-speeding avalanche of greed, hatred, and brutality.  And when the crash should come—­the girl shuddered.  It must not be.  She would shriek a warning from the house-tops even at cost of her uncle, of McNamara, and of herself.  And yet she had no proof that a crime existed.  Although it all lay clear in her own mind, the certainty of it arose only from her intuition.  If only she were able to take a hand—­if only she were not a woman.  Then Cherry Malotte’s words anent Struve recurred to her, “A bottle of wine and a woman’s face.”  They brought back the lawyer’s assurance that those documents she had safeguarded all through the long spring-time journey really contained the proof.  If they did, then they held the power to check this impending conflict.  Her uncle and the boss would not dare continue if threatened with exposure and prosecution.  The more she thought of it, the more urgent seemed the necessity to prevent the battle of to-night.  There was a chance here, at least, and the only one.

Adding to her mental torment was the constant vision of that face in the curtains at the Northern.  It was her brother, yet what mystery shrouded this affair, also?  What kept him from her?  What caused him to slink away like a thief discovered?  She grew dizzy and hysterical.

Struve turned in his chair as the door to his private office opened, then leaped to his feet at sight of the gray-eyed girl standing there.

“I came for the papers,” she said.

“I knew you would.”  The blood went out of his cheeks, then surged back up to his eyes.  “It’s a bargain, then?”

She nodded.  “Give them to me first.”

He laughed unpleasantly.  “What do you take me for?  I’ll keep my part of the bargain if you’ll keep yours.  But this is no place, nor time.  There’s riot in the air, and I’m busy preparing for to-night.  Come back to-morrow when it’s all over.”

But it was the terror of to-night’s doings that led her into his power.

“I’ll never come back,” she said.  “It is my whim to know to-day—­ yes, at once.”