Kate went me one better. Gee! She _did_ have a time! Of course, woman-like, though she was a squaw, the first thing she thought about, after she saw white ladies on the wharves, at Skagway, was clothes. Mrs. Saul Timney had to dress the part, and she was bound to do it if it half-killed her, which it did. She bought a whole civilised outfit of duds at the White House in ’Frisco, and got the chambermaid to help her into ’em; that’s where she got the first jolt. It wasn’t so easy as it looked. She couldn’t walk in the high-heeled shoes they wear here, and so she kept on moccasins. Corsets she gave up early in the game. They didn’t show, anyway, being inside. Finally she got a dressmaker to rig her up a sort of a loose red dress that they call a Mother Hubbard. Her favourite cover was an ermine cape. She bought it because it cost more than anything else in the fur store. She just splurged on hats and bonnets. I reckon she had a new one every day. The thing that tickled her most was gloves, for her hands were good and little. She wore white ones all the time. I s’pose it was because she felt she looked more like an American woman that way. The swell togs she couldn’t wear she bought just the same. We skated through town like a forest-fire, me doing the talking and her the picking out. She got darned near everything that I ever knew women wore, and a big lot of others I never had heard of. Every time she picked a thing, and pulled out the yellow boys to pay for it her eyes stuck out. Of course, not being used to doing business that way, it looked to her like every clerk behind the counter was her slave, all ready to give her anything she said. She never got over her wonder at the “medicine stones.” She had to stop in front of every jewelry store she saw, too, but I couldn’t get her to buy anything worth wearing. She just turned up her nose at diamonds and rubies, but at the sight of a cheap string of beads she went out of her head. She generally wore five or six necklaces of ’em over her cape. Lord, I didn’t care, and what she wanted, she got. Well, after she’d let the money run away from her for a couple of weeks, she got tired of the game and kind of homesick. She begun to pine for cold weather and ice and all, while I was just beginning to enjoy the place. I tried to brace her up, and thinking it might please her to hear the seals bark at the Cliff House, we drove out there in a hack. We were down to the “White House” store one day, when I run slap into Flora Donovan, that used to live next door to us in Virginia City. She was only a kid when I went north. She’d grown up into considerable of a woman now, but I knew her. So I went up to her, and offered to shake hands. She glared pretty hard till I told her who I was and how money had come my way. It seems her folks had struck it rich, too, and she had more money than she knew what to do with.