Sandy sighed, for he felt that there was little hope for him, and again fell into a moody silence. There was a run that night on the little Jew shop at the corner of the Howling Wilderness. Before midnight the little kinky-headed Israelite had not a shirt, collar, or handkerchief, or white fabric of any kind whatever in the shop. It might have been a bit of first-class and old-fashioned chivalry that had lain dormant in these great hairy breasts, or it might have been their strict regard for the appropriateness of names that made these men at once call her the "Widder;" or it might have been some sudden revelation, a sort of inspiration, given to the first man who saw her as she rode down the mountain into camp, or the first man who spoke of her as she rode blushing through their midst with her pretty face held modestly down; but be all that as it may, certainly there was no design, no delay, no hesitation about it from the first. And yet the appellation was singularly appropriate, and perhaps suggested to this poor, lone little woman, daring to cross the mountains, and to come down into this great chasm of the earth, among utter strangers, the conduct of her life. The first woman came unheralded. Like all good things on earth, she came quietly as a snowflake down in their midst, without ado or demonstration. Who she was or where she came from no one seemed to know. Perhaps the propriety of questioning occurred to some of the men of the camp, but it never found expression. I had rather say, however, that when they found there was a real live woman in camp, a decent woman, who was willing to work and take her place beside the men in the great battle--bear her part in the common curse which demands that we shall toil to eat, they quietly accepted the fact, as men do the fact of the baby's arrival, without any question whatever. This was not really the first woman to come into the camp of this thousand of bearded men; and yet it was the first. There were now five or six, maybe more, down at the Forks--some from Sydney, some from New Orleans--waifs of the foam, painted children of passion. I am not disposed to put all these women in the catalogue of saints. They were very devils, some of them. These women set man against man, and that Winter made many a crimson place in the great snow banks in the streets. They started the first graveyard at the Forks; and kept it recruited too, every holiday, and almost every Sunday. True, they did some good. I do not deny that. For example, I have in my mind now the picture of one, Bunker Hill, holding the head of a brave young fellow, shot through the temple, his long black hair in strings and streaming with blood. She held him so till he died; and mourned and would not be separated from him while a hope or a breath remained--the blood on her hands, on her face, all over her costly silks and lace, and on the floor.