It came on to rain in the afternoon. Heavy clouds swept across from the
mountains, and the sodden sky opened like a sluice-box. The Kusiak
contingent, driven indoors, resorted to bridge. Miss O'Neill read.
Gordon Elliot wrote letters, dawdled over magazines, and lounged
alternately in the ladies' parlor and the smoking-room, where Macdonald,
Strong, a hardware merchant from Fairbanks, and a pair of sour-dough
miners had settled themselves to a poker game that was to last all night
and well into the next day.
Of the two bridge tables all the players were old-timers except Mrs.
Mallory. Most of them were young enough in years, but they had been of
the North long enough to know the gossip of the country and its small
politics intimately. They shared common hopes of the day when Alaska
would be thrown open to industry and a large population.
But Mrs. Mallory had come in over the ice for the first time last
winter. The other women felt that she was a bird of passage, that the
frozen Arctic could be no more than a whim to her. They deferred a
little to her because she knew the great world--New York, Vienna,
London, Paris. Great names fell from her lips casually and carelessly.
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