He wore heavy logging boots, brown canvas trousers kept up by a belt, and a brown shirt, showing hairy brown arms and a bared, scraggy throat. A battered, sun-cast, felt hat lay on his head. His face was wrinkled and weather-beaten to the equivalent of tanned hide. He wore great, long, drooping moustaches snow white in colour. His eyes were limpid blue. "It's you, Mr. Horsfal," he mumbled rather thickly, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere underground; "didn't know you in the distance." "Jake,--shake with Mr. George Bremner;--he's going to supervise the place and the new store, same as I explained to you two weeks ago. Hope you make friends. He's to be head boss man, and his word goes; but you'll find him twenty-four carat gold." "That's darned fine gold, boss," grunted Jake. He held out his horny hand and grasped mine, exclaiming heartily enough: "Glad to meet you, George." He pulled out a plug of tobacco from his hip pocket, brushed some of the most conspicuous dirt and grime from it, bit off what appeared to me to be a mouthful and began to look me over. "He's new," he grunted, as if to himself; "but he's young and big. He looks tough; he's got the right kind of jaw." Then he turned to Mr. Horsfal. "Guess, when he gets the edges rubbed off, he'll more than make it, boss," he said. K. B. Horsfal laughed loudly. "That's just what I thought myself, Jake. Now, give us the keys to the oil barns and the new store. Go and help unload that baggage and truck from the launch. You can follow your usual bent after that, for I'll be showing George over the place myself." I found the prospective store just as it had been described: a large, plain, front room, now fitted with shelves and a counter, and all freshly painted. Everything was in readiness to accommodate the stock, most of which was due to arrive the next afternoon. Where a door had been, leading into the other parts of the house, it was now solidly partitioned up, leaving only front and back entrances to the store. We spent the afternoon in the open air, inspecting the property, which was perfectly situated for scenic beauty, with plenty of cleared, fertile land near the shore and rich in giant timber behind. In the early part of the evening, after a cold lunch aboard the launch, we went back to the house and, for the first time, Mr. Horsfal inserted a key into the front door of the dwelling proper. I had been not a little curious regarding this place and I was still wondering where it was intended that I should take up my quarters. Jake Meaghan seemed all right in his own Klondikish, pork-and-beans-and-a-blanket way, but I hardly fancied him as a rooming partner and a possible bedfellow. To be candid, I never had had a bedfellow in all my life and I had already made up my mind that, rather than suffer one now, I would fix up one of the several empty barns which were scattered here and there over the property, and thus retain my beloved privacy.