"You set still." His pardner pushed him down on his stool. "Mr. Benham and I'll see what's up."
The Trader leisurely opened the door, Salmon P. keeping modestly behind, while Kaviak darted forward only to be caught back by Mac. An avalanche of sound swept in—a mighty howling and snarling and cracking of whips, and underneath the higher clamour, human voices—and in dashes the Boy, powdered with snow, laughing and balancing carefully in his mittened hands a little Yukon spruce, every needle diamond-pointed, every sturdy branch white with frost crystals and soft woolly snow, and bearing its little harvest of curious fruit—sweet-cake rings and stars and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green branches, the Noah's Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak's incredulous eyes.
"There's your Christmas-tree!" and the bringer, who had carried the tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought scarlet into his cheeks. "Here, take it!" He dashed the tree down in front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap against the lintel, calling out:
"Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out." Behind him, between the snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces—weather-beaten men, crowding in the narrow space, craning to see the reception of the Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.
"These gentlemen," says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered them in, "are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter. They've just done the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minóok with dogs over the ice! They've been forty days on the trail, and they're as fit as fiddles. An' no yonder, for Little Minóok has made big millionaires o' both o' them!"
Millionaires or not, they'll never, either of them, create a greater sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin, on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What. Here was Certainty at last! Here was Justification!
Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were shaken and wildly welcomed, "peeled," set down by the fire, given punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from despair.
Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn't hear. The Colonel kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment, O'Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, "Be the Siven!" Potts not only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O'Flynn said after, "stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate knot behind." Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.
John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically American. You see him again and again—as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to camp for gold and freedom. He takes risks cheerfully, and he never works for wages when he can go "on his own."
John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. He was perhaps thirty-six, had been "in" ten years, and had mined before that in Idaho. Under his striped parki he was dressed in spotted deer-skin, wore white deer-skin mucklucks, Arctic cap, and moose mittens. Pinned on his inner shirt was the badge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers—a footrule bent like the letter A above a scroll of leaves, and in the angle two linked O's over Y. P.