er
sat. Dickensen looked out of the window at him before he went to lunch;
and when he came back from lunch he looked out of the window, and the
old Siwash was still there.

Dickensen continued to look out of the window, and he, too, forever
afterward prided himself upon his swiftness of discernment. He was a
romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen the genius
of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading
Saxon. The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did
not by a hair's-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man
who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where men passed to
and fro. They thought the man was resting, but later, when they touched
him, they found him stiff and cold, frozen to death in the midst of the
busy street. To undouble him, that he might fit into a coffin, they had
been forced to lug him to a fire and thaw him out a bit. Dickensen
shivered at the recollection.

Later on, Dickensen went out on the sidewalk to smoke a cigar and cool
off; and a little later Emily Travis happened along. Emily Travis was
dainty and delicate and rare, and whether in London or Klondike, she
gowned herself as befitted the daughter of a millionaire mining
engineer. Little Dickensen deposited his cigar on an outside window
ledge where he could find it again, and lifted his hat.

They chatted for ten minutes or so, when Emily Travis, glancing past
Dickensen's shoulder, gave a startled little scream. Dickensen turned
about to see, and was startled, too. Imber had crossed the street and
was standing there, a gaunt and hungry-looking shadow, his gaze riveted
upon the girl.

"What do you want?" Little Dickensen demanded, tremulously plucky.

Imber grunted and stalked up to Emily Travis. He looked her over, keenly
and carefully, every square inch of her. Especially did he appear
interested in her silky brown hair, and in the color of her cheek,
faintly sprayed and soft, like the downy bloom of a butterfly wing. He
walked around her, surveying her with the calculating eye of a man who
studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded. In the course
of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the
westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then
he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes.
He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and
elbow. W