a low-pay placer where long hours of severe toil earned each man
between fifteen and twenty dollars a day. The brief Alaskan summer
protracted itself beyond its usual length, and they took advantage
of the opportunity, delaying their return to Skaguay to the last
moment. And then it was too late. Arrangements had been made to
accompany the several dozen local Indians on their fall trading
trip down the coast. The Siwashes had waited on the white people
until the eleventh hour, and then departed. There was no course
left the party but to wait for chance transportation. In the
meantime the claim was cleaned up and firewood stocked in.

The Indian summer had dreamed on and on, and then, suddenly, with
the sharpness of bugles, winter came. It came in a single night,
and the miners awoke to howling wind, driving snow, and freezing
water. Storm followed storm, and between the storms there was the
silence, broken only by the boom of the surf on the desolate shore,
where the salt spray rimmed the beach with frozen white.

All went well in the cabin. Their gold-dust had weighed up
something like eight thousand dollars, and they could not but be
contented. The men made snowshoes, hunted fresh meat for the
larder, and in the long evenings played endless games of whist and
pedro. Now that the mining had ceased, Edith Nelson turned over
the fire-building and the dish-washing to the men, while she darned
their socks and mended their clothes.

There was no grumbling, no bickering, nor petty quarrelling in the
little cabin, and they often congratulated one another on the
general happiness of the party. Hans Nelson was stolid and easy-
going, while Edith had long before won his unbounded admiration by