ere?'

"Then Black Jack flew off the handle. You know he's got a system of
manhandling that's near the record in these parts. Well, he just landed
on the little man. He got him down and started to lambast the Judas out
of him. He gave him the 'leather,' and then some. I guess he'd have done
him to a finish hadn't I been Johnnie on the spot. At sight of me he
gives a curse, jumps on his horse and goes off at a canter. Well, I
propped the little man against a tree, and then some fellows came along,
and we got him some brandy. But he was badly done up. He kept saying:
'Oh, de devil, de big devil, sure I'll give him his before I get
t'rough.' Funny, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it's strange;" and for some time I pondered over the remarkable
strangeness of it.

"That reminds me," said Jim; "has any one seen the Jam-wagon?"

"Oh yes," answered the Prodigal; "poor beggar! he's down and out. After
the fight he went to pieces, every one treating him, and so on. You
remember Bullhammer?"

"Yes."

"Well, the last I saw of the Jam-wagon--he was cleaning cuspidors in
Bullhammer's saloon."

* * * * *

We had hauled the logs for the cabin, and the foundation was laid. Now
we were building up the walls, placing between every log a thick
wadding of moss. Every day saw our future home nearer completion.

One evening I spied the saturnine Ribwood climbing the hill to our tent.
He hailed me:

"Say, you're just the man I want."

"What for?" I asked; "not to go down that shaft again?"

"No. Say! we want a night watchman up at the claim to go on four hours a
night at a dollar an hour. You see, there's been a lot of sluice-box
robberies lately, and we're scared for our clean-up. We're running two
ten-hour shifts now and cleaning up every three days; but there's four
hours every night the place is deserted, and Hoofman proposed we should
get you to keep watch."

"Yes," I said; "I'll run up every evening if the others don't object."

They did not; so the next night, and for about a dozen after that, I
spent the darkest hours watching on the claim where previously I had
worked.

There was never any real darkness down there in that narrow valley, but
there was dusk of a kind that made everything grey and uncertain. It was
a vague, nebulous atmosphere in which objects merged into each other
confusedly. Bushes came down to within a few feet of where we were
working, dense-growing alder and birch that would ha