years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for
No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain
mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it.
He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.

"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' I
tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods
trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.

"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't Buffalo
Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They call 'em Inkers
and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico.
They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says the brown man,
'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into red jars till
they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba
each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a stone house,
with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over
the door.'

"'How do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.

"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with
the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't any
reciprocity."'

"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him
dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I
couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on the coast of
this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years. I
thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly. I
loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron
pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and
safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a
mule-driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could
interpret mules all right, but he drove the English language much too
hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side
up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.

"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it
took us nine days to find it. But one afternoon McClintock led the other
mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice five
thousand feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of the beasts drummed
on it just like before George M. Cohan makes his first entrance on the
stage.

"This village was built of