before seen such a thing in all his life. He was not a comely man.
He was gray; he was ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was
wan and haggard; his eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had
attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then
corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight.
Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy
undertaker at Bentley's Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at
Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is
dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.

As Mr. Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged knees,
his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no apparent
intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest movement
would tumble him to pieces. Yet during the last hour he had winked
no fewer than three times.

There was a sharp rapping at the door. A rap at that time of night
and in that weather might have surprised an ordinary mortal who had
dwelt two years in the gulch without seeing a human face, and could
not fail to know that the country was impassable; but Mr. Beeson did
not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals. And even when the
door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into
himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather
not see. You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary
chapel, the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.

But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied up in a
handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler, wearing green
goggles and with a complexion of glittering whiteness where it could
be seen, strode silently into the room, laying a hard, gloved hand on