The
servants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with the
remarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafed
nothing. But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she
bought a passage south on a strayed sealing schooner. That winter
she cooked for Captain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the
spring continued south to Sitka on a whisky sloop. Later on
appeared at Metlakahtla, which is near to St. Mary's on the end of
the Pan-Handle, where she worked in the cannery through the salmon
season. When autumn came and the Siwash fishermen prepared to
return to Puget Sound, she embarked with a couple of families in a
big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the hazardous chaos of
the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits of Juan de Fuca
were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard pave of
Seattle.
There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much
surprised and, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so
wroth as he might have been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of
her Jees Uck breathed not a word, for she had never believed.
Sandy, who read commonplace and sordid desertion into the
circumstance, strove to dissuade her from her trip to San
Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he was at
home.
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