w
and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long dust-heavy winds, the
play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen fret of fatigue
when the storm outlasts physical endurance. But prospectors and Indians
get a kind of a weather shell that remains on the body until death.

The Pocket Hunter had seen destruction by the violence of nature and
the violence of men, and felt himself in the grip of an All-wisdom that
killed men or spared them as seemed for their good; but of death by
sickness he knew nothing except that he believed he should never suffer
it. He had been in Grape-vine Canon the year of storms that changed the
whole front of the mountain. All day he had come down under the wing
of the storm, hoping to win past it, but finding it traveling with him
until night. It kept on after that, he supposed, a steady downpour,
but could not with certainty say, being securely deep in sleep. But the
weather instinct does not sleep. In the night the heavens behind the
hill dissolved in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed
with his dreaming, so that it moved him, still asleep, to get up and out
of the path of it. What finally woke him was the crash of pine logs as
they went down before the unbridled flood, and the swirl of foam that
lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub while the wall of
water went by. It went on against the cabin of Bill Gerry and laid Bill
stripped and broken on a sand bar at the mouth of the Grape-vine, seven
miles away. There, when the sun was up and the wrath of the rain spent,
the Pocket Hunter found and buried him; but he never laid his own escape
at any door but the unintelligible favor of the Powers.

The journeyings of the Pocket Hunter led him often into that mysterious
country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like,
under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency is at work in that
neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes
means and direction without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides
with insidious heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at
the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam
and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up
sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make
a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the
kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavo