Sitka Charley did not know this kind of woman. Five minutes
before, he did not even dream of taking charge of the expedition;
but when she came to him with her wonderful smile and her
straight clean English, and talked to the point, without pleading
or persuading, he had incontinently yielded. Had there been a
softness and appeal to mercy in the eyes, a tremble to the voice,
a taking advantage of sex, he would have stiffened to steel;
instead her clear-searching eyes and clear-ringing voice, her
utter frankness and tacit assumption of equality, had robbed him
of his reason. He felt, then, that this was a new breed of woman;
and ere they had been trail mates for many days he knew why the
sons of such women mastered the land and the sea, and why the
sons of his own womankind could not prevail against them. Tender
and soft! Day after day he watched her, muscle-weary, exhausted,
indomitable, and the words beat in upon him in a perennial
refrain. Tender and soft! He knew her feet had been born to easy
paths and sunny lands, strangers to the moccasined pain of the
North, unkissed by the chill lips of the frost, and he watched
and marveled at them twinkling ever through the weary day.
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