“There’s your Christmas-tree!” and the bringer, who had carried the tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought scarlet into his cheeks.  “Here, take it!” He dashed the tree down in front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the blast.  Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare.  The Boy stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap against the lintel, calling out: 

“Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out.”  Behind him, between the snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces—­weather-beaten men, crowding in the narrow space, craning to see the reception of the Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.

“These gentlemen,” says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered them in, “are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter.  They’ve just done the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minook with dogs over the ice!  They’ve been forty days on the trail, and they’re as fit as fiddles.  An’ no yonder, for Little Minook has made big millionaires o’ both o’ them!”

Millionaires or not, they’ll never, either of them, create a greater sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin, on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What.  Here was Certainty at last!  Here was Justification!

Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were shaken and wildly welcomed, “peeled,” set down by the fire, given punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from despair.

Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn’t hear.  The Colonel kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment, O’Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, “Be the Siven!” Potts not only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O’Flynn said after, “stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate knot behind.”  Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.

John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically American.  You see him again and again—­as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to camp for gold and freedom.  He takes risks cheerfully, and he never works for wages when he can go “on his own.”