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."

John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce
of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness
of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the
eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and
few words in his firm, rather gri