me down in the hold, and threw a tent
rus! We could hear the ice grating and
nding together, and bumping the sides
the scow; and we could feel the vessel
ver when the great slabs of ice tried to
> up on deck.

‘Mrs. Davis was so filled with terror that
-couldn’t move, or speak to me, even!
thing but a miracle saved that scow and
from the ice!”
At Stewart the scow had frozen in solid,
ere it remained until the ice went out
the Yukon the next spring. Still deter-
ned to reach home, Mae Field walked to
. next Mounted Police station. There she
ited until the mail carrier was ready ta
ke the trip by dog team to Dawson. She
nt with him. Everyone was overjoyed at
- arrival, and the good news she brought.

“You were a brave girl,” I told her, “to
re that journey! Most people would have
en overcome by fear.”

“No, it’s the things we don’t understand
+t we fear. I was used to ice. One fall I,
th 26 others, went over the Chilkoot Pass
midnight. It was a frozen mountain-side
ice, with stair-like steps chipped out. One
» would have meant aimost certain death!
“But even after we'd crossed the Pass at
sht in order to get to Skagway in time to
tch the boat, it turned out to be the old,
seaworthy Georgia, the most ‘ feared
amer on the Skagway-Juneau run. I,
ne, of the 26 who had crossed the Pass,
yk a chance on it. I had a safe voyage,
»; but the others had to wait ten days for
e next boat out of Skagway.”

“T shouldn’t mind going up the Chilkoot
ss, but the idea of going down makes my
ad swim!” I declared.

“T missed death by about six inches, once,
ing up,” she returned.

It seems that mail, express, and freight
ere taken up on a tram, in huge iron

Alberni Hardware
Company Limited
“Everything in Hardware”

Phone 146 Port Alberni, B. C.

Few stampeders were properly equipped for the harsh northern trails, but those who reached the
Klondike and stayed there, soon learned to dress in fur parkas.

buckets attached to a hoisting cable. The
cable broke when the bucket was half-way
up, and it came crashing down almost on
top of her. Among the things going up in
the bucket was a pink parrot owned by an
Australian couple.

“For once the trained bird was speech-
less,” Mrs. Field laughed. “Then after the
bucket had stopped with a thud, right beside
me, the parrot screamed, “What the hell!
Cut it out!”

“That was lovely Mae’s last trip back to
her home at 19 Bear Creek. The claim was
worked out. The fortune went into other
mining ventures, and was soon swallowed
up in the hungry mouth of failure. The
young couple who had left home and
friends for the Land of the Midnight Sun,
their hearts filled with love and dreams of
gold, found themselves penniless.

Far more difficult for Mae than the loss
of a fortune, however, was another loss.
What happened no one knows, for even
today, here in the North, one does not ask
personal questions.

“We just drifted apart,” she told me, in
a voice choked with a sob.

She had lost the love of the man for
whom she had given up her chance for
stage stardom, for whom she had left the
world of comforts and convenience to come
to the crude, inhospitable land of ice and
snow. But, loyal even in the face of his

—Photo: Mrs. J. B. Taylor.

desertion, Mae had bravely signed back
the valuable property in Hot Springs that
Arthur Field had given her on their wed-
ding day. It was with the small fortune
that the sale of this property brought him
that Arthur Field went to the newly-dis-
covered Fairbanks strike. There he amassed

another fortune in gold.

Returning, a wealthy man again, to his
boyhood home in South Dakota, Arthur
Field divorced his beautiful, loyal wife, and
married a Hot Springs girl.

Meanwhile little Mae, heavy-hearted,
penniless, and alone in the Far North,
turned to dancing, the only thing she knew,
for a livelihood. She became a dancing girl
at the Floradora!

But the Doll of Dawson didn’t live at the
notorious palace of chance, where she was
compelled to earn her livelihood. She lived
in a tiny cabin at the end of Main Street,
where she could be alone with her sad

When in Port Alberni
Eat at

THE BEAUFORT CAFE

HUGH LEE, Proprietor

Port Alberni, British Columbia

Alberni Pacific Lumber Co. Ltd.

PORT ALBERNI, B.C.

Compliments of

ae

CURTEENTH EDITION

Page Thirty-three