Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/346

 with the tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania, with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho on the Western plains.

"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.

"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name," Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.

Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly, red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair, the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and day she had been with him, his first claim named for her—the Madeline—