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."