"I can find my friends," she assured him.

"This is the wrong latitude in which to dispute a lady, but
knowin' this camp from soup to nuts, as I do, I su'gests a male
escort."

"Very well! I wish to find Mr. Struve, of Dunham & Struve,
lawyers."

"I'll take you to their offices," said Glenister. "You see to the
baggage, Dex. Meet me at the Second Class in half an hour and
we'll run out to the Midas." They pushed through the tangle of
tents, past piles of lumber, and emerged upon the main
thoroughfare, which ran parallel to the shore.

Nome consisted of one narrow street, twisted between solid rows of
canvas and half-erected frame buildings, its every other door that
of a saloon. There were fair-looking blocks which aspired to the
dizzy height of three stories, some sheathed in corrugated iron,
others gleaming and galvanized. Lawyers' signs, doctors',
surveyors', were in the upper windows. The street was thronged
with men from every land--Helen Chester heard more dialects than
she could count. Laplanders in quaint, three-cornered, padded caps
idled past. Men with the tan of the tropics rubbed elbows with
yellow-haired Norsemen, and near her a carefully groomed Frenchman
with riding-breeches and monocle was in pantomime with a skin-clad
Eskimo. To her left was the sparkling sea, alive with ships of
every class. To her right towered timberless mountains, unpeopled,
unexplored, forbidding, and desolate--their hollows inlaid with
snow. On one hand were the life and the world she knew; on the