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Where a bit of the big river curved inward like the tongue of a friendly dog, lapping the shore at Athabasca Landing, there still reers' Row--nine dilapidated, weather-worn, and crazily-built shacks put there by the eccentric genius who had foreseen a boom ten years ahead of its ti from either one end or the other, was naers himself, the Good Old Queen Bess It was a shack covered with black tar paper, with ts, like square eyes, fronting the river as if always on the watch for soers had built a porch to protect hitime, from the sun in Summer time, and from the snow in the ers sat out all of that part of his life which was not spent in bed

Up and doo thousand ers known, and there were superstitious ones who believed that little gods and devils came to sit and commune with him in the front of the tar-papered shack No one was so wise along those rivers, no one was so satisfied with hiiven s that were hidden away in Dirty Fingers' brain One would not have suspected the workings of that brain by a look at Dirty Fingers on the porch of his Good Old Queen Bess He was a great soft lu in his smooth-worn, wooden are, his hair uncut and scraggy, his face smooth as a baby's, fat as a cherub's, and as expressionless as an apple

His folded are stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enorold, and Dirty Fingers' thu at this chain How he had coht naers, no one could definitely say, unless it was that he always bore an unkempt and unwashed appearance

Whatever the quality of the two hundred and forty-odd pounds of flesh in Dirty Fingers' body, it was the quality of his brain that ers was a lawyer, a wilderness lawyer, a forest bencher, a legal strategist of the trail, of the river, of the great timber-lands

Stored away in his brain was every rule of equity and coe he went back two hundred years He knew that a law did not die of age, that itpast he had dug up every trick and trap of his trade He had no law-books His library was in his head, and his facts were marshaled in pile after pile of closely-written, dust-covered papers in his shack He did not go to court as other lawyers; and there were barristers in Edmonton who blessed him for that