And the young man, as yet only twenty-six, was still an invalid, although he had lost nothing of his old spirit and daring—and back of the date when he had fallen exhausted in the snow and had been left for dead, his memory was clear enough.
Therefore, naturally, he remembered the man who had intruded upon him in his sleeping room in the Lynne mansion in New York City, which he had been in possession of so short a time—for everything that had happened to him before that dreadful experience was as strong in his recollection as if the happening had been yesterday.
And this Red Mike had been one of the bad characters of that former experience in the Klondike.
He had been a bad man and a dangerous one, until he was cornered; but at such times, like others of his ilk, he had inevitably proved himself an unconscionable coward.
Mike had been at one time the proprietor of a saloon, a gambler, and everything that was bad; he had been a sluice robber, a road agent, a thief, a bully, and he had been suspected of at least one murder done in cold blood, where the victim had been shot in the back, and without an opportunity to defend himself.
But there had been no proof of it, and he had not been made to suffer the consequences of it, as should have been the case.
And once upon a time, when Lynne and Carroll and two others had found the man lost in the snow and near the point of perishing they had rescued him and saved his life.
Most men would be grateful forever for such an act of succor, but it had seemed to incur the enmity and hatred of Red Mike, rather than his friendliness.
And then, just before Lynne started out on the trail which was to be his last one in that country—the time he was supposed to have lost his life—Lynne had had occasion to administer a thorough thrashing to the Red one.
These are small things, to be sure, but with a character like Red Mike’s there is no such thing as forgetting them—and Mike had not forgotten.