make it for themselves. It was in an early day that Red Cow flourished
on the Yukon--1887--and the Klondike and its populous stampedes lay in
the unguessed future. The men of Red Cow did not even know whether their
camp was situated in Alaska or in the North-west Territory, whether they
drew breath under the stars and stripes or under the British flag. No
surveyor had ever happened along to give them their latitude and
longitude. Red Cow was situated somewhere along the Yukon, and that was
sufficient for them. So far as flags were concerned, they were beyond
all jurisdiction. So far as the law was concerned, they were in No-Man's
land.

They made their own law, and it was very simple. The Yukon executed
their decrees. Some two thousand miles below Red Cow the Yukon flowed
into Bering Sea through a delta a hundred miles wide. Every mile of
those two thousand miles was savage wilderness. It was true, where the
Porcupine flowed into the Yukon inside the Arctic Circle there was a
Hudson Bay Company trading post. But that was many hundreds of miles
away. Also, it was rumoured that many hundreds of miles farther on there
were missions. This last, however, was merely rumour; the men of Red Cow
had never been there. They had entered the lone land by way of Chilcoot
and the head-waters of the Yukon.

The men of Red Cow ignored all minor offences. To be drunk and
disorderly and to use vulgar language were looked upon as natural and
inalienable rights. The men of Red Cow were individualists, and
recognized as sacred but two things, property and life. There were no
women present to complicate their simple morality. There were only three
log-cabins in Red Cow--the majority of the population of forty men living
in tents or brush shacks; and there was no jail in which to confine
malefactors, while the inhabitants were too busy digging gold or seeking
gold to take a day off and build a jail. Besides, the paramount question
of grub negatived such a procedure. Wherefore, when a man violated the
rights of property or life, he was thrown into an open boat and started
down the Yukon. The quantity of grub he received was proportioned to the
gravity of the offence. Thus, a common thief might get as much as two
weeks' grub; an uncommon thief might get no more than half of that. A
murderer got no grub at all. A man found guilty of manslaughter would
receive grub for from three days to a week. And Marcus O'Brien had been