There was only one man inside the hut, and that was the proprietor, Abe Durton himself, or “Bones,” as he had been christened with the rude heraldry of the camp. He was sitting in front of the great wood fire, gazing moodily into its glowing depths, and occasionally giving a fagot a kick of remonstrance when it showed any indication of dying into a smoulder. His fair Saxon face, with its bold simple eyes and crisp yellow beard, stood out sharp and clear against the darkness as the flickering light played over it. It was a manly, resolute countenance, and yet the physiognomist might have detected something in the lines of the mouth which showed a weakness somewhere, an indecision which contrasted strangely with his herculean shoulders and massive limbs. Abe’s was one of those trusting, simple natures which are as easy to lead as they are impossible to drive; and it was this happy pliability of disposition which made him at once the butt and the favorite of the dwellers in the Sluice. Badinage in that primitive settlement was of a somewhat ponderous character, yet no amount of chaff had ever brought a dark look on Bones’s face, or an unkind thought into his honest heart. It was only when his aristocratic partner was, as he thought, being put upon, that an ominous tightness about his lower lip and an angry light in his blue eyes, caused even the most irrepressible humorist in the colony to nip his favorite joke in the bud, in order to diverge into an earnest and all-absorbing dissertation upon the state of the weather. “The Boss is late to-night,” he muttered, as he rose from his chair, and stretched himself in a colossal yawn. “My stars, how it does rain and blow! Don’t it, Blinky?” Blinky was a demure and meditative owl, whose comfort and welfare was a chronic subject of solicitude to its master, and who at present contemplated him gravely from one of the rafters. “Pity you can’t speak, Blinky,” continued Abe, glancing up at his feathered companion. “There’s a powerful deal of sense in your face. Kinder melancholy too. Crossed in love, maybe, when you was young. Talkin’ of love,” he added, “I’ve not seen Susan to-day;” and lighting the candle which stood in a black bottle upon the table, he walked across the room and peered earnestly at one of the many pictures from stray illustrated papers, which had been cut out by the occupants and posted up upon the walls. The particular picture which attracted him was one which represented a very tawdrily dressed actress simpering over a bouquet at an imaginary audience. This sketch had, for some inscrutable reason, made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of the miner. He had invested the young lady with a human interest by solemnly, and without the slightest warrant, christening her as Susan Banks, and had then installed her as his standard of female beauty.