Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log shanty projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam of light, and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle fastened to the hillside with a bright new pin.  Within it sat Mr. Beeson himself, before a roaring fire, staring into its hot heart as if he had never before seen such a thing in all his life.  He was not a comely man.  He was gray; he was ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was wan and haggard; his eyes were too bright.  As to his age, if one had attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then corrected himself and said seventy-four.  He was really twenty-eight.  Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley’s Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at Sonora.  Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone.  It is dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.

As Mr. Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged knees, his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no apparent intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest movement would tumble him to pieces.  Yet during the last hour he had winked no fewer than three times.

There was a sharp rapping at the door.  A rap at that time of night and in that weather might have surprised an ordinary mortal who had dwelt two years in the gulch without seeing a human face, and could not fail to know that the country was impassable; but Mr. Beeson did not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals.  And even when the door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather not see.  You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary chapel, the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.

But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied up in a handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler, wearing green goggles and with a complexion of glittering whiteness where it could be seen, strode silently into the room, laying a hard, gloved hand on Mr. Beeson’s shoulder, the latter so far forgot himself as to look up with an appearance of no small astonishment; whomever he may have been expecting, he had evidently not counted on meeting anyone like this.  Nevertheless, the sight of this unexpected guest produced in Mr. Beeson the following sequence:  a feeling of astonishment; a sense of gratification; a sentiment of profound good will.  Rising from his seat, he took the knotty hand from his shoulder, and shook it up and down with a fervor quite unaccountable; for in the old man’s aspect was nothing to attract, much to repel.  However, attraction is too general a property for repulsion to be without it.  The most attractive object in the world is the face we instinctively cover with a cloth.  When it becomes still more attractive—­ fascinating—­we put seven feet of earth above it.