oul of
the splendid dead had given him a strength which it was impossible to
have gained from the living. For Anton Fournet had died smiling,
laughing, singing--and it was of Anton Fournet that he dreamed when he
fell asleep. And in that dream came also the vision of a man called
Dirty Fingers--and with it inspiration.

CHAPTER XI

Where a bit of the big river curved inward like the tongue of a
friendly dog, lapping the shore at Athabasca Landing, there still
remained Fingers' Row--nine dilapidated, weather-worn, and
crazily-built shacks put there by the eccentric genius who had foreseen
a boom ten years ahead of its time. And the fifth of these nine,
counting from either one end or the other, was named by its owner,
Dirty Fingers himself, the Good Old Queen Bess. It was a shack covered
with black tar paper, with two windows, like square eyes, fronting the
river as if always on the watch for something. Across the front of this
shack Dirty Fingers had built a porch to protect himself from the rain
in springtime, from the sun in Summer time, and from the snow in the
months of Winter. For it was here that Dirty Fingers sat out all of
that part of his life which was not spent in bed.

Up and down two thousand miles of the Three Rivers was Dirty Fingers
known, and there were superstitious ones who believed that little gods
and devils came to sit and commune with him in the front of the
tar-papered shack. No one was so wise along those rivers, no one was so
satisfied with himself, that he would not have given much to possess
the many things that were hidden away in Dirty Fingers' brain. One
would not have suspected the workings of that brain by a look at Dirty
Fingers on the porch of his Good Old Queen Bess. He was a great soft
lump of a man, a giant of flabbiness. Sitting in his smooth-worn,
wooden armchair, he was almost formless. His head was huge, his hair
uncut and scraggy, his face smooth as a baby's, fat as a cherub's, and
as expressionless as an apple. His folded arms always rested on a huge
stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enormous watch-chain
made from beaten nuggets of Klondike gold, and Dirty Fingers' thumb and
forefinger were always twiddling at this chain. How he had come by the
name of Dirty Fingers, when his right name was Alexander Toppet
Fingers, no one could definitely say, unless it was that he always bore
an unkempt and unwashed appearance.

Whatever the quality of the two h