" for any
man.

Men began to get curious. I assert that curiosity is not the monopoly of
sex. One Sunday some half idle and wholly inquisitive men went up to
this cabin as they passed in the trail, which ran hard by, and asked for
a drink of water.

A little hand brought a dipper of water to the door. A boy face lifted
up timidly to the great bearded men from Missouri as they in turn drank
and passed the big tin dipper from one to the other till it was drained;
then the little hand took the dipper back again and disappeared, while
the men, half ashamed and wholly confounded, stumbled on up the trail.

The boy had been so civil, so shy, so modest, and yet, when occasion
offered, so kind withal, that few could refuse to be his friends; and
now he had, only by lifting his eyes, won over this knot of half-vulgar,
half-ruffianly fellows wholly to his side.

Once the saloon-keeper, the cinnamon-haired man of the Howling
Wilderness, as the one whisky shop of this New Eden was called, met him
on the trail as he was going out with a pick and shovel on his shoulder,
to prospect for gold.

"What is your name, my boy?"

"Billie Piper."

The timid brown eyes looked up through the cluster of yellow curls, as
the boy stepped aside to let the big man pass; and the two, without
other words, went on their ways.

Oddly enough they allowed this boy to keep his name. They called him
Little Billie Piper.

He was an enigma to the miners. Sometimes he looked to be only fifteen.
Then again he was very thoughtful. The fair brow was wrinkled sometimes;
there were lines, sabre cuts of time, on the fair delicate face, and
then he looked to be at least double that age.

He worked, or at least he went out to work, every day with his pick and
pan and shovel; but almost always they saw him standing by the running
stream, looking into the water, dreaming, seeing in Nature's mirror the
snowy clouds that blew in moving mosaic overhead and through and over
the tops of the tossing firs.

He rarely spoke to the men more than in monosyllables. Yet when he did
speak to them his language was so refined, so far above their common
speech, and his voice was so soft, and his manner so gentle that they
saw in him, in some sort, a superior.

Yet Limber Tim, the boy-man, came pretty near to this boy's life. At
least he stood nearer to his heart than any one. Their lives were nearer
the same level. One Sunday they stood together on the hill by the
grav