The Tiger's Cub

A snow-battered odyssey unfolds when David Summers, greenhorn gentleman from the temperate states, staggers half-dead across the Alaskan whiteout and is salvaged by a flame-haired huntress known only as Tiger’s Cub—her nickname a brand left by the gambler-patriarch who swears she is blood of his blood. In the candle-smoke of a cedar cabin, affection sparks between rescuer and rescued, yet every caress is shadowed: the girl’s supposed sire, the swaggering Tiger, and his cadaverous partner Bill Slack have only days earlier fleeced and shot David’s father over a crooked poker hand, flinging the corpse to an icy ravine. When Tiger returns from the diggings, he barters his daughter—like a sack of nuggets—for Slack’s half-share in the very claim he stole, threatening to abandon the girl’s tubercular mother to the wolves unless the marriage oath is sworn. Under that blackmail, the wedding proceeds; the nuptial night becomes attempted rape, halted by David’s timely axe-handle through the door and by the spectral gunshot of Slack’s long-abandoned wife, Hilda, whose bullet delivers frontier justice. Tiger is clapped in irons for the murder, a paternity lie collapses—he is no father at all—and the lovers step into the pale dawn, freed by blood, snow, and the death of false names.