This cabin was not his, by the way, having been built several years previously by a couple of miners who had got out a raft of logs at that point for a grub-stake.  They had been most hospitable lads, and, after they abandoned it, travelers who knew the route made it an object to arrive there at nightfall.  It was very handy, saving them all the time and toil of pitching camp; and it was an unwritten rule that the last man left a neat pile of firewood for the next comer.  Rarely a night passed but from half a dozen to a score of men crowded into its shelter.  Jacob Kent noted these things, exercised squatter sovereignty, and moved in.  Thenceforth, the weary travelers were mulcted a dollar per head for the privilege of sleeping on the floor, Jacob Kent weighing the dust and never failing to steal the down-weight.  Besides, he so contrived that his transient guests chopped his wood for him and carried his water.  This was rank piracy, but his victims were an easy-going breed, and while they detested him, they yet permitted him to flourish in his sins.

One afternoon in April he sat by his door,—­for all the world like a predatory spider,—­marvelling at the heat of the returning sun, and keeping an eye on the trail for prospective flies.  The Yukon lay at his feet, a sea of ice, disappearing around two great bends to the north and south, and stretching an honest two miles from bank to bank.  Over its rough breast ran the sled-trail, a slender sunken line, eighteen inches wide and two thousand miles in length, with more curses distributed to the linear foot than any other road in or out of all Christendom.

Jacob Kent was feeling particularly good that afternoon.  The record had been broken the previous night, and he had sold his hospitality to no less than twenty-eight visitors.  True, it had been quite uncomfortable, and four had snored beneath his bunk all night; but then it had added appreciable weight to the sack in which he kept his gold dust.  That sack, with its glittering yellow treasure, was at once the chief delight and the chief bane of his existence.  Heaven and hell lay within its slender mouth.  In the nature of things, there being no privacy to his one-roomed dwelling, he was tortured by a constant fear of theft.  It would be very easy for these bearded, desperate-looking strangers to make away with it.  Often he dreamed that such was the case, and awoke in the grip of nightmare.  A select number of these robbers haunted him through his dreams, and he came to know them quite well, especially the bronzed leader with the gash on his right cheek.  This fellow was the most persistent of the lot, and, because of him, he had, in his waking moments, constructed several score of hiding-places in and about the cabin.  After a concealment he would breathe freely again, perhaps for several nights, only to collar the Man with the Gash in the very act of unearthing the sack.  Then, on awakening in the midst of the usual struggle,