I
Once Freda and Mrs. Eppingwell clashed.
Now Freda was a Greek girl and a dancer. At least she purported to be
Greek; but this was doubted by many, for her classic face had overmuch
strength in it, and the tides of hell which rose in her eyes made at rare
moments her ethnology the more dubious. To a few--men--this sight had
been vouchsafed, and though long years may have passed, they have not
forgotten, nor will they ever forget. She never talked of herself, so
that it were well to let it go down that when in repose, expurgated,
Greek she certainly was. Her furs were the most magnificent in all the
country from Chilcoot to St. Michael's, and her name was common on the
lips of men. But Mrs. Eppingwell was the wife of a captain; also a
social constellation of the first magnitude, the path of her orbit
marking the most select coterie in Dawson,--a coterie captioned by the
profane as the "official clique." Sitka Charley had travelled trail with
her once, when famine drew tight and a man's life was less than a cup of
flour, and his judgment placed her above all women. Sitka Charley was an
Indian; his criteria were primitive; but his word was flat, and his
verdict a hall-mark in every camp under the circle.
These two women were man-conquering, man-subduing machines, each in her
own way, and their ways were different. Mrs. Eppingwell ruled in her own
house, and at the Barracks, where were younger sons galore, to say
nothing of the chiefs of the police, the executive, and the judiciary.
Freda ruled down in the town; but the men she ruled were the same who
functioned socially at the Barracks or were fed tea and canned preserves
at the hand of Mrs. Eppingwell in her hillside cabin of rough-hewn logs.
Each knew the other existed; but their lives were apart as the Poles, and
while they must have heard stray bits of news and were curious, they were
never known to ask a question. And there would have been no trouble had
not a free lance in the shape of the model-woman come into the land on
the first ice, with a spanking dog-team and a cosmopolitan reputation.
Loraine Lisznayi--alliterative, dramatic, and Hungarian--precipitated the
strife, and because of her Mrs. Eppingwell left her hillside and invaded
Freda's domain, and Freda likewise went up from the town to spread
confusion and embarrassment at the Governor's ball.
All of which may be ancient history so far as the Klondike is concerned,
but very few, even in Dawson, know the inner truth of the matter; nor
beyond those few are there any fit to measure the wife of the captain or
the Greek dancer. And that all are now permitted to understand, let
honor be accorded Sitka Charley. From his lips fell the main facts in
the screed herewith presented. It ill befits that Freda herself should
have waxed confidential to a mere scribbler of words, or that Mrs.
Eppingwell made mention of the things which happened. They may have
spoken, but it is unlikely.