e carried out. He
never thought about it afterwards, or frittered away his strength in
hours of torturing doubt as to whether it was a good one to have made,
or whether some other might not have been better. Once made, he kept to
it, good or bad, leaving it to chance whether he died or succeeded in
his attempt to carry it out. And this conservation of energy in all
other mental processes resulted in a splendid strength for action and a
limitless endurance in the carrying out of his decisions.

And as he walked now he thought very little, except in a resigned way,
of the physical discomfort he was enduring, and of the time when he
should reach his cabin. Dusk had already fallen before he came to the
gulch, and he had to strain his eyes to find the narrow trail which
descended the side of the gorge. His log cabin, carefully and solidly
constructed, stood half-way down the northern slope of the gulch, on a
sort of natural platform formed by the vagaries of the now narrowed
stream in its younger and wilder days. Beneath the cabin stretched his
claims, 500 feet of dry soil on the slope of the hill, 100 feet this
side of the stream and fairly in the creek, and 100 feet on the farther
side, a stretch of 700 feet in all, and of a quality that made it at
that time the richest claim for fifty miles round. Shafts, reaching down
to bed rock, were sunk all over it, and great mounds of frozen gravel
beside them showed how untiringly they had been worked. In addition to
these, the man's native energy had prompted him to drive a tunnel
horizontally for some distance into the side of the hill that rose
steeply behind the cabin. The tunnel pierced the hill for 100 feet, and
at the end a shaft had been sunk to bed rock, and it was from here at
present that the highest grade ore was coming. Moved by an instinct to
protect what he intuitively felt would be his richest possession, Talbot
had built his tunnel in one solid block with the cabin, and closed its
outer end with a huge door, well provided with bars and bolts. So long
as this door was successfully held, no claim-jumper could penetrate into
the tunnel or reach the shaft at the end. By this means, too, a double
protection was afforded the living cabin, though of this he thought
comparatively little, for the face of the cabin presented nothing but
its one small window and this huge solid door. Upon opening this you
found yourself in the tunnel; if you kept straight on you reached the
s