There were no means of ventilation, save through the front door, the windows, and the stove-pipe. The liquor rested in a five-gallon demijohn, which Cuff denominated his “retail department.” Good old Micky Cuff, as he heard himself ironically called by his neighbors, was not generally looked upon as either good or handsome. Heavy and tall of figure, he had plentiful, long, stiff, iron-gray hair, and bristling eyebrows. His face was broad and retreating at the base, and narrow and projecting at the top, preceded, when he walked, by a pug nose, which seemed always heartily ashamed that it was not large in proportion to the vast expanse of cheek flanking it on either side, and hence appeared more insignificant than it really was. But the lack of size in the nasal appendage was more than compensated by the yawning chasm beneath, dividing the countenance into two moieties, and commonly called a mouth. Cuff’s mouth was the crater of a miniature volcano, continually bursting forth with loud oaths, running streams of tobacco juice and bursts of fetid breath, causing the face to tremble with the vehemence of the smouldering fires of the elements within. To make the thing still more hideous, there were four tusks in the front of the upper and lower jaw, jutting out slantingly, causing either lip to protrude and assume a grin, which would have made the fortune of any actor who affected the line of character professionally dubbed the “heavy villain.” When Cuff laughed, which was constantly—and never more diabolically than when incensed to the pitch of working violence upon something—his little, round, black eyes retreated into their sockets, the nose wriggled felicitously, like the stump of a dog’s tail when begging for meat, and his four broad tusks clattered together, causing his repeated guffaws to assume the tone of an illy played pair of castanets combined with the before-mentioned stage thunder. In fact, the big fellow’s face was open, like that of an alligator. Dressed in coarse miners’ blouse and pantaloons, with boots of the usual weight—Cuff seldom wore his hat, excepting when in the street or the mine, for he was an expert miner, and labored when he could by day, selling whisky at night—he was a perfect wonder to behold.