He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very
set in his ideas. He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until
the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his
loom. His cabin stood midway between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart
River; and men who made it a custom to travel the trail to Dawson,
likened him to a robber baron, perched in his fortress and exacting toll
from the caravans that used his ill-kept roads. Since a certain amount
of history was required in the construction of this figure, the less
cultured wayfarers from Stuart River were prone to describe him after a
still more primordial fashion, in which a command of strong adjectives
was to be chiefly noted.
This cabin was not his, by the way, having been built several years
previously by a couple of miners who had got out a raft of logs at that
point for a grub-stake. They had been most hospitable lads, and, after
they abandoned it, travelers who knew the 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.
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