"We shall live quietly," Lucile told Frona. "The Klondike is not all
the world, and the best is yet to come."
But Jacob Welse said otherwise. "We've got to make this thing go," he
said to Captain Alexander, and Captain Alexander said that he was
unaccustomed to backing out.
Mrs. Schoville emitted preliminary thunders, marshalled the other
women, and became chronically seismic and unsafe.
Lucile went nowhere save to Frona's. But Jacob Welse, who rarely went
anywhere, was often to be found by Colonel Trethaway's fireside, and
not only was he to be found there, but he usually brought somebody
along. "Anything on hand this evening?" he was wont to say on casual
meeting. "No? Then come along with me." Sometimes he said it with
lamb-like innocence, sometimes with a challenge brooding under his
bushy brows, and rarely did he fail to get his man. These men had
wives, and thus were the germs of dissolution sown in the ranks of the
opposition.
Then, again, at Colonel Trethaway's there was something to be found
besides weak tea and small talk; and the correspondents, engineers, and
gentlemen rovers kept the trail well packed in that direction, though
it was the Kings, to a man, who first broke the way. So the Trethaway
cabin became the centre of things, and, backed commercially,
financially, and officially, it could not fail to succeed socially.
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