When the girl disappeared on the trail to Candle MacShane mushed on. For an hour he mushed steadily, and with a start of surprise, he realized that during that hour he had been thinking entirely of the girl he had met on the trail. He remembered that Christmas in Dawson, when he had lifted her onto the piano. He remembered that he had picked out the prettiest doll on the Christmas tree, and given it to her. “Funny I never noticed her, then,” he mused. “Must be because she’s grow’d up. But, eyes like that--I sure ought to have noticed. Kind of soft, an’ dark, like you could look way down into ’em--an’ all the time you know she’s lookin’ into your own--sort of sizin’ you up. If a man had anything on his mind that he had to hide, he couldn’t look into those eyes.... Wonder how much powder it’s goin’ to take to move enough of that rock to find out what’s under it.... Swung out behind those dogs like a man ... I’ll bet she can trail all day.... Ton of powder ought to do.... She broke ’em herself, an’ she’s set on drivin’ that race.... I can start in on the lower end an’ work up through.... God! where’d she be if a blizzard hit, an’ she got caught here without shelter?... Main trouble’s goin’ to be handlin’ the damn rock after it’s blow’d out.... Old Man Gordon won’t know me.... I wore a beard those days.... Anyhow, I ain’t goin’ to be bothered with water, I’ll work into it before the thaw ... I won’t let on who I am.... Wonder what he thought when he found his dust salted back in the shaft? Wonder if he told _her_? Hell--I hope not! Won’t make any difference, though, if they don’t know me.” And so it went, the man struggling to concentrate upon his red gold, and the girl obtruding his thoughts--muddling his problem. Half-angrily, he decided to banish thought of both the girl and the red gold from his mind. And so he continued his journey to Nome, thinking continuously of the girl with the soft dark eyes. MacShane drove a fast trail and arrived in Nome early in the evening of the second day after his meeting with Lou Gordon. He had heard that Nome was a big camp, and a live one. But he was totally unprepared to find a modern, electrically lighted city on the bleak coast of Norton Sound. “Camp--hell!” he exclaimed, as he passed along the brilliantly illuminated street, “She’s a town! I sure passed up a big thing when I quit this country an’ headed for the Yukon. But, I was only a kid, then.”