And when the carpenter had gone old Jim took his little foundling from the berth and sat him on his knee.

In the tiny chap’s arms the powder-flask-and-potato doll was firmly held.  The face of the lady had wrinkled with a premature descent of age upon her being.  One of her eyes had disappeared, while her soot-made mouth had been wiped across her entire countenance.

The quaint bit of a boy was dressed, as usual, in the funny little trousers that came to his heels, while his old fur cap had been kept in requisition for the warmth it afforded his ears.  He cuddled confidingly against his big, rough protector, but he made no sound of speaking, nor did anything suggestive of a smile come to play upon his grave little features.

Jim had told him of Christmas by the hour—­all the beauty of the story, so old, so appealing to the race of man, who yearns towards everything affording a brightness of hope and a faith in anything human.

“What would little Skeezucks like for his Christmas?” the man inquired, for the twentieth time.

The little fellow pressed closer against him, in baby shyness and slowly answered: 

“Bruv-ver—­Jim.”

The miner clasped him tenderly against his heart.  Yet he had but scanty intimation of the all the tiny pilgrim meant.

He sat with him throughout that day, however, as he had so many of these fleeting days.  The larder was neglected; the money contributed at “church” had gone at once, to score against a bill at the store, as large as the cabin itself, and only the labors of Keno, chopping brush for fuel, kept the home supplied even with a fire.  Jim had been born beneath the weight of some star too slow to move along.

When Keno came back to the cabin from his work in the brush it was well along in the afternoon.  Jim decided to go below and stock up the pantry with food.  On arriving at the store, however, he met a new manner of reception.

The gambler, Parky, was in charge, as a recent purchaser of the whole concern.

“You can’t git no more grub-stake here without the cash,” he said to Jim.  “And now you’ve come, you can pony up on the bill you ’ain’t yet squared.”

“So?” said Jim.

“You bet your boots it’s so, and you can’t begin to pungle up a minute too soon!” was the answer.

“I reckon you’d ask a chicken to pungle up the gravel in his gizzard if you thought he’d picked up a sliver of gold,” Jim drawled, in his lazy utterance.  “And an ordinary chicken, with the pip thrown in, could pungle twice to my once.”

“Ain’t got the stuff, hey?” said Parky.  “Broke, I s’pose?  Then maybe you’ll git to work, you old galoot, and stop playin’ parson and goody-goody games.  You don’t git nothing here without the chink.  So perhaps you’ll git to work at last.”

A red-nosed henchman of the gambler’s put in a word.

“I don’t see why you ’ain’t gone to work,” he said.