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Northern Lights, Volume 4. by Gilbert Parker
page 23 of 85 (27%)
She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height
and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which more
than a few men had drowned themselves. Also, once she had saved a
settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their
intended victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life.
Pioneers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen who
rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the
palisade of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed upon the
settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last. Cerebrospinal
meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the memory of that
time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis was past, was
still fresh on the tongues of all.

Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her husband
had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she in everything.
And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers
pass into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to
her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for
days, against the laughing protests of their parents. Flood Rawley
called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that
fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces
softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the
few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and
every man was her friend--and nothing more. She had never had an
accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her. Every man except
one had given up hope that he might win her; and though he had been gone
from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the days before the
Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was now to return and
say again what he had mutely said for years--what she understood, and he
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