f pot black, and he had a curious fashion of going about with his
mouth open, which gave him a vacant look until you came near enough to
perceive him busy about an endless hummed, wordless tune. He traveled
far and took a long time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for beans, a coffee-pot, a frying-pan,
a tin to mix bread in--he fed the burros in this when there was
need--with these he had been half round our western world and back. He
explained to me very early in our acquaintance what was good to take to
the hills for food: nothing sticky, for that "dirtied the pots;" nothing
with "juice" to it, for that would not pack to advantage; and nothing
likely to ferment. He used no gun, but he would set snares by the
water-holes for quail and doves, and in the trout country he carried a
line. Burros he kept, one or two according to his pack, for this chief
excellence, that they would eat potato parings and firewood. He had
owned a horse in the foothill country, but when he came to the desert
with no forage but mesquite, he found himself under the necessity of
picking the beans from the briers, a labor that drove him to the use of
pack animals to whom thorns were a relish.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention. He must be
born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion, like the tap on
the test tube that induces crystallization. My friend had been several
things of no moment until he struck a thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee
District and came into his vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small
body of rich ore occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff.
Nearly every mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to
hit upon them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man to
do who has found a good pocket is to buy himself into business and keep
away from the hills. The logical thing is to set out looking for another
one. My friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking twenty years. His
working outfit was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan which he kept cleaner
than his plate, and a pocket magnifier. When he came to a watercourse
he would pan out the gravel of its bed for "colors," and under the glass
determine if they had come from far or near, and so spying he would work
up the stream until he found where the drift of the gold-bearing outcrop
fanned out into the creek; then up the side of the canon till he came
to the proper vein. I think he