But it remained for Dickensen, Little Dickensen, to be the hero of the occasion.  Little Dickensen had come into the land with great dreams and a pocketful of cash; but with the cash the dreams vanished, and to earn his passage back to the States he had accepted a clerical position with the brokerage firm of Holbrook and Mason.  Across the street from the office of Holbrook and Mason was the heap of cabin-logs upon which Imber sat.  Dickensen looked out of the window at him before he went to lunch; and when he came back from lunch he looked out of the window, and the old Siwash was still there.

Dickensen continued to look out of the window, and he, too, forever afterward prided himself upon his swiftness of discernment.  He was a romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen to the genius of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading Saxon.  The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did not by a hair’s-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where men passed to and fro.  They thought the man was resting, but later, when they touched him, they found him stiff and cold, frozen to death in the midst of the busy street.  To undouble him, that he might fit into a coffin, they had been forced to lug him to a fire and thaw him out a bit.  Dickensen shivered at the recollection.

Later on, Dickensen went out on the sidewalk to smoke a cigar and cool off; and a little later Emily Travis happened along.  Emily Travis was dainty and delicate and rare, and whether in London or Klondike she gowned herself as befitted the daughter of a millionnaire mining engineer.  Little Dickensen deposited his cigar on an outside window ledge where he could find it again, and lifted his hat.

They chatted for ten minutes or so, when Emily Travis, glancing past Dickensen’s shoulder, gave a startled little scream.  Dickensen turned about to see, and was startled, too.  Imber had crossed the street and was standing there, a gaunt and hungry-looking shadow, his gaze riveted upon the girl.

“What do you want?” Little Dickensen demanded, tremulously plucky.

Imber grunted and stalked up to Emily Travis.  He looked her over, keenly and carefully, every square inch of her.  Especially did he appear interested in her silky brown hair, and in the color of her cheek, faintly sprayed and soft, like the downy bloom of a butterfly wing.  He walked around her, surveying her with the calculating eye of a man who studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded.  In the course of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency.  Then he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes.  He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and elbow.  With his other hand he lifted her forearm and doubled it back.  Disgust and wonder showed in his face, and he dropped her arm with a contemptuous grunt.  Then he muttered a few guttural syllables, turned his back upon her, and addressed himself to Dickensen.