His folded arms always rested on a huge stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enormous watch-chain made from beaten nuggets of Klondike gold, and Dirty Fingers' thumb and forefinger were always twiddling at this chain.

How he had come by the name of Dirty Fingers, when his right name was Alexander Toppet Fingers, 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 made people hold him in a sort of awe.

For Dirty Fingers 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 common law of the great North country.

For his knowledge he went back two hundred years.
He knew that a law did not die of age, that it must be legislated to death, and out of the moldering past he had dug up every trick and trap of his trade.

He had no law-books.