They made their own law, and it was very simple.  The Yukon executed their decrees.  Some two thousand miles below Red Cow the Yukon flowed into Bering Sea through a delta a hundred miles wide.  Every mile of those two thousand miles was savage wilderness.  It was true, where the Porcupine flowed into the Yukon inside the Arctic Circle there was a Hudson Bay Company trading post.  But that was many hundreds of miles away.  Also, it was rumoured that many hundreds of miles farther on there were missions.  This last, however, was merely rumour; the men of Red Cow had never been there.  They had entered the lone land by way of Chilcoot and the head-waters of the Yukon.

The men of Red Cow ignored all minor offences.  To be drunk and disorderly and to use vulgar language were looked upon as natural and inalienable rights.  The men of Red Cow were individualists, and recognized as sacred but two things, property and life.  There were no women present to complicate their simple morality.  There were only three log-cabins in Red Cow—­the majority of the population of forty men living in tents or brush shacks; and there was no jail in which to confine malefactors, while the inhabitants were too busy digging gold or seeking gold to take a day off and build a jail.  Besides, the paramount question of grub negatived such a procedure.  Wherefore, when a man violated the rights of property or life, he was thrown into an open boat and started down the Yukon.  The quantity of grub he received was proportioned to the gravity of the offence.  Thus, a common thief might get as much as two weeks’ grub; an uncommon thief might get no more than half of that.  A murderer got no grub at all.  A man found guilty of manslaughter would receive grub for from three days to a week.  And Marcus O’Brien had been elected judge, and it was he who apportioned the grub.  A man who broke the law took his chances.  The Yukon swept him away, and he might or might not win to Bering Sea.  A few days’ grub gave him a fighting chance.  No grub meant practically capital punishment, though there was a slim chance, all depending on the season of the year.

Having disposed of Arizona Jack and watched him out of sight, the population turned from the bank and went to work on its claims—­all except Curly Jim, who ran the one faro layout in all the Northland and who speculated in prospect-holes on the sides.  Two things happened that day that were momentous.  In the late morning Marcus O’Brien struck it.  He washed out a dollar, a dollar and a half, and two dollars, from three successive pans.  He had found the streak.  Curly Jim looked into the hole, washed a few pans himself, and offered O’Brien ten thousand dollars for all rights—­five thousand in dust, and, in lieu of the other five thousand, a half interest in his faro layout.  O’Brien refused the offer.  He was there to make money out of the earth, he declared with heat, and not out of his fellow-men.  And anyway, he didn’t like faro.  Besides, he appraised his strike at a whole lot more than ten thousand.