Summary
A lone woman, swaddled in soot-black furs, cleaves through the permafrost of the Klondike like a scalpel seeking a tumor: her brother Jimmy, whose last letter promised gold but delivered only silence. The settlement she discovers is less a town than a scab—raw, wind-scraped, clinging to rumor and kerosene. Here, memory is traded in nuggets: some gleam, most are fool’s. Barbara Henderson, corseted by grief, learns that Jimmy’s blood has already fed the river; vengeance becomes her religion. Lodged in a lean-to presided over by Tully Winkle—a prospector whose beard hoards more secrets than ore—she scrubs pans and dreams of retribution. Cort Dorian, Tully’s taciturn partner, carries the glint of redemption in his eyes, yet Barbara’s heart remains manacled to the riddle of a corpse that refuses to surface. Whispers coil through saloon doors: a shoot-out over Seattle Lou, a dance-hall siren whose silhouette could launch a thousand stampedes. Laberge, the swaggering marksman of that fracas, insists Cort pulled the trigger. Honor, flimsy as ice in April, demands a duel at dawn. Two shots ring out; one bullet kisses sky, the other flesh. Before smoke can settle, Tully barrels in with news that shatters the narrative like crystal on stone—Seattle Lou has disembarked, veiled and radiant, on the arm of a very alive Jimmy Henderson. The corpse was a fiction; the wound, regrettably, is not.
Failing to hear from her brother Jimmy after his departure for the Klondike, Barbara Henderson goes in search of him. Arriving in the frozen North, Barbara learns that her brother has been murdered and vows vengeance. Because the town's small hotel is filled to capacity, Barbara accepts an offer of lodging from old Tully Winkle in return for her keeping house for him and his prospecting partner, Cort Dorian. Barbara and Cort fall in love, but Barbara refuses to marry Cort until she solves the mystery of her brother's death. From various sources she learns that Jimmy's disappearance was preceded by a shoot-out between him and prospector Laberge over Seattle Lou. Barbara then makes the acquaintance of Laberge, who tells her that Cort shot Jimmy. Barbara insists upon fighting a duel with Cort, who fires into the air and is wounded by Barbara's bullet. Just as the shots are fired, Tully appears with the news that Seattle Lou has just arrived in town with her new husband, Jimmy Henderson.
