It was a quiet night in the Shovel. At the bar, which ranged along one side of thelarge chinked-log room, leaned half a dozen men, two of whom were discussing therelative merits of spruce-tea and lime-juice as remedies for scurvy. They arguedwith an air of depression and with intervals of morose silence. The other menscarcely heeded them. In a row, against the opposite wall, were the gamblinggames. The crap-table was deserted. One lone man was playing at the faro-table.The roulette-ball was not even spinning, and the gamekeeper stood by the roaring, red-hot stove, talking with the young, dark-eyed woman, comely of face and figure, who was known from Juneau to Fort Yukon as the Virgin. Three men sat in at studpoker, but they played with small chips and without enthusiasm, while there wereno onlookers. On the floor of the dancing-room, which opened out at the rear, three couples were waltzing drearily to the strains of a violin and a piano.Circle City was not deserted, nor was money tight. The miners were in fromMoseyed Creek and the other diggings to the west, the summer washing had beengood, and the men's pouches were heavy with dust and nuggets. The Klondike hadnot yet been discovered, nor had the miners of the Yukon learned the possibilitiesof deep digging and wood-firing. No work was done in the winter, and they made apractice of hibernating in the large camps like Circle City during the long Arcticnight. Time was heavy on their hands, their pouches were well filled, and the onlysocial diversion to be found was in the saloons. Yet the Shovel was practicallydeserted, and the Virgin, standing by the stove, yawned with uncovered mouth andsaid to Charley Bates: -"If something don't happen soon, I'm gin' to bed. What's the matter with thecamp, anyway? Everybody dead?"Bates did not even trouble to reply, but went on moodily rolling a cigarette. DanMacDonald, pioneer saloonman and gambler on the upper Yukon, owner andproprietor of the Tivoli and all its games, wandered forlornly across the greatvacant space of floor and joined the two at the stove."Anybody dead?" the Virgin asked him."Looks like it," was the answer."Then it must be the whole camp," she said with an air of finality and withanother yawn.6MacDonald grinned and nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when thefront door swung wide and a man appeared in the light. A rush of frost, turned tovapor by the heat of the room, swirled about him to his knees and poured on acrossthe floor, growing thinner and thinner, and perishing a dozen feet from the stove.Taking the wisp broom from its nail inside the door, the newcomer brushed thesnow from his moccasins and high German socks. He would have appeared a largeman had not a huge French-Canadian stepped up to him from the bar and grippedhis h