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 se