The middle of April found Miss Mar a guest of the Dorns. Jacob L. seemed presently to abandon all idea of dissuading his wife’s friend from carrying her wild scheme into execution, but he pointed out the little need there was to rush blindly into avoidable difficulties. Better ships were in process of being chartered for the northern service, in view of the undreamed-of demand. The season, moreover, was late this year. Those earlier, inferior vessels (schooners and what not) that were to get off before the middle of May would only spend the time “knocking about the North Pacific, among the icebergs.” So Hildegarde waited while Mr. Dorn looked thoroughly into the question. Even looking into it seemed perilous. It told on the gentleman’s health, as one might suppose. When Hildegarde had been only a few days under his roof, her host took to his bed with congestion of the lungs. Madeleine absorbed in nursing the husband had little time for the friend. Hildegarde was suddenly thrown on her own resources. But she felt it would be impolitic to write that fact to Valdivia. From one shipping office to another, from Southwick’s Great Outfitting Emporium to the Baumgarten Brothers’ Wholesale Provision House, she went in quest of information; threading her way through the bustling streets, where among the featureless thousands, day by day she often saw the figure of the frontiersman in broad-brimmed hat and brown boots, laced to the knee; or the weather-beaten miner, in “waders” and brown duck or mackinaw. “_They’re_ coming to Nome!” she would say to herself, looking on them already as fellow-travelers. One feeling much with her is perhaps really rather new in woman’s experience, among the many things called “new” that are yet so old. It seems as if never before her generation could it have been a matter of course to a girl like Hildegarde Mar, that she should feel instinctively it would be as absurd to treat these bearded frontiersmen with condescension, as to be terrified of them. Not that she analyzed the situation. It was too simple for that. Her feeling was merely that these uncouth fellow-creatures were possible friends of hers. As she met and passed them, or in imagination “placed” them in her coming experience, her mental attitude was singularly untarnished by the age-old anxiety of the unprotected female casting about for a champion. Something less self-centered than that, something kindlier, less the child of fear. Cheviot might have qualms, but man was not for Hildegarde her natural enemy. A woman alone was not obliged to peep furtively about for shelter, or for some coign of vantage, like one pursued in a hostile land. Not his immemorial prey, she; but like him the possible prey of circumstance, with ignorance for her arch-enemy as well as his. Those booted and sombreroed men—some of them at least—had already met and overcome the common enemy. They would be masters of the situation up there.