"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white
that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell,
and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you be
comin'?'

"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the
yarn I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting
there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening and
looking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of
the pages of Thoreau or of any other man's book.

"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She
promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians
that would put me across the best pass of the Rockies in five
hundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart from the others, on
the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did
her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and
talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and
make a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.

"She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what
that means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without
end.

"'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no
time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the
cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and
the washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be
plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in