A dozen willing, though unsympathetic, hands laid the drunkard on the roulette-table, where the bartender poured pitcher upon pitcher of water over him.

“He ain’t hurt none to speak of,” said a bystander; then added, with enthusiasm: 

“But say!  There’s a man in this here camp!”

CHAPTER VI

AND A MINE IS JUMPED

“Who’s your new shift boss?” Glenister inquired of his partner, a few days later, indicating a man in the cut below, busied in setting a line of sluices.

“That’s old ‘Slapjack’ Simms, friend of mine from up Dawson way.”

Glenister laughed immoderately, for the object was unusually tall and loose-jointed, and wore a soiled suit of yellow mackinaw.  He had laid off his coat, and now the baggy, bilious trousers hung precariously from his angular shoulders by suspenders of alarming frailty.  His legs were lost in gum boots, also loose and cavernous, and his entire costume looked relaxed and flapping, so that he gave the impression of being able to shake himself out of his raiment, and to rise like a burlesque Aphrodite.  His face was overgrown with a grizzled tangle that looked as though it had been trimmed with button-hole scissors, while above the brush heap grandly soared a shiny, dome-like head.

“Has he always been bald?”

“Naw!  He ain’t bald at all.  He shaves his nob.  In the early days he wore a long flowin’ mane which was inhabited by crickets, tree-toads, and such fauna.  It got to be a hobby with him finally, so that he growed superstitious about goin’ uncurried, and would back into a corner with both guns drawed if a barber came near him.  But once Hank—­that’s his real name—­undertook to fry some slapjacks, and in givin’ the skillet a heave, the dough lit among his forest primeval, jest back of his ears, soft side down.  Hank polluted the gulch with langwidge which no man had ought to keep in himself without it was fumigated.  Disreppitableness oozed out through him like sweat through an ice-pitcher, an’ since then he’s been known as Slapjack Simms, an’ has kept his head shingled smooth as a gun bar’l.  He’s a good miner, though; ain’t none better—­an’ square as a die.”

Sluicing had begun on the Midas.  Long sinuous lengths of canvas hose wound down the creek bottom from the dam, like gigantic serpents, while the roll of gravel through the flumes mingled musically with the rush of waters, the tinkle of tools, and the song of steel on rock.  There were four “strings” of boxes abreast, and the heaving line of shovellers ate rapidly into the creek bed, while teams with scrapers splashed through the tail races in an atmosphere of softened profanity.  In the big white tents which sat back from the bluffs, fifty men of the night shift were asleep; for there is no respite here—­no night, no Sunday, no halt, during the hundred days in which the Northland lends herself to pillage.