was in no wise apparent. It might possibly have put the warm blood

under her skin, which made her face less swart and her body fairer;
but that, in turn, might have come from Shpack, the Big Fat, who

inherited the colour of his Slavonic father. And, finally, she had
great, blazing black eyes--the half-caste eye, round, full-orbed,

and sensuous, which marks the collision of the dark races with the
light. Also, the white blood in her, combined with her knowledge

that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious. Otherwise by
upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and utterly a

Toyaat Indian.
One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her

life. But he came into her life, as he had come into the country,
somewhat reluctantly. In fact, it was very much against his will,

coming into the country. Between a father who clipped coupons and
cultivated roses, and a mother who loved the social round, Neil

Bonner had gone rather wild. He was not vicious, but a man with
meat in his belly and without work in the world has to expend his

energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man. And he expended
his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that when the

inevitableclimax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled
out of his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering

eye. Then he hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits,
with whom he was wont to confer over coupons and roses, and between

the two the destiny of young Neil Bonner was made manifest. He
must go away, on probation, to live down his harmless follies in

order that he might live up to their own excellent standard.
This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great

deal ashamed, the rest was easy. The cronies were heavy
stockholders in the P. C. Company. The P. C. Company owned fleets

of river-steamers and ocean-going craft, and, in addition to
farming the sea, exploited a hundred thousand square miles or so of

the land that, on the maps of geographers, usually occupies the
white spaces. So the P. C. Company sent young Neil Bonner north,

where the white spaces are, to do its work and to learn to be good
like his father. "Five years of simplicity, close to the soil and

far from temptation, will make a man of him," said old Neil Bonner,
and forthwith crawled back among his roses. Young Neil set his

jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work. As an
underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his

superiors. Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the
one thing that prevented him from going mad.

The first year he wished he was dead. The second year he cursed
God. The third year he was divided between the two emotions, and

in the confusion quarrelled with a man in authority. He had the
best of the quarrel, though the man in authority had the last

word,--a word that sent Neil Bonner into an exile that made his old
billet appear as paradise. But he went without a whimper, for the

North had succeeded in making him into a man.
Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets

like the letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these
circlets, on one side or the other, are names such as "Fort

Hamilton," "Yanana Station," "Twenty Mile," thus leading one to
imagine that the white spaces are plentifully besprinkled with

towns and villages. But it is a vain imagining. Twenty Mile,
which is very like the rest of the posts, is a log building the

size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs. A long-
legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple

of outhouses. The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the
skyline and an unascertainable bit beyond. There are no other

houses in sight, though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a
mile or two down the Yukon. And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle

of the many-tentacled P. C. Company. Here the agent, with an
assistant, barters with the Indians for their furs, and does an

erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the wandering miners.
Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all winter for the

spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on the roof
while the Yukon washes out the establishment. And here, also, in

the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to
take charge.

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously" target="_blank" title="ad.预先；以前">previously ran the post
had made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place,"

said the assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by
their fires, had another version. The assistant was a shrunken-

shouldered, hollow-chested man, with a cadaverous face and
cavernous cheeks that his sparse black beard could not hide. He

coughed much, as though consumption gripped his lungs, while his
eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives in the last

stage. Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did not like
him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.

They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men,
should have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence

and darkness of the long winter.
In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and

left him alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking.
Even then, Amos had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised

hatred for him. This was a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling
face of one of his own kind, the cheery word, the sympathy of

comradeship shared with misfortune--these things meant much; and
the winter was yet young when he began to realize the added

reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had found
to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched
away on every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really

frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the
silence of death. For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer

steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero. Then a
change came over the face of things. What little moisture had

oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull grey, formless clouds;
it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and

the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules that hissed
like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. After that

it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered
to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all.

Nothing happened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing
forests, nothing but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated

moisture. Possibly the most notable thing that occurred through
the weary weeks was the gliding of the temperature up to the

unprecedented height of fifteen below. To atone for this, outer
space smote the earth with its cold till the mercury froze and the

spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below for a
fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it

was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity,
was the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of

light between the darkness.
Neil Bonner was a social animal. The very follies for which he was

doing penance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And
here, in the fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company-

-which were to travesty the word--with a morose and speechless
creature in whose sombre eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it

was unwarranted. And Bonner, to whom speech and fellowship were as
the breath of life, went about as a ghost might go, tantalized by

the gregarious revelries of some former life. In the day his lips
were compressed, his face stern; but in the night he clenched his

hands, rolled about in his blankets, and cried aloud like a little
child. And he would remember a certain man in authority and curse

him through the long hours. Also, he cursed God. But God
understands. He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortals

who blaspheme in Alaska.
And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for

flour and bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy
work. And further, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty

Mile to make a lonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty