l the Defiance twisted
through. "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor for us and moved the bar
to the back room. The fair was designed for the support of the circuit
rider who preached to the few that would hear, and buried us all in
turn. He was the symbol of Jimville's respectability, although he was of
a sect that held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took
no chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate intimation
that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the front door and
around to the back. Then the dance began formally with no feelings
hurt. These were the sort of courtesies, common enough in Jimville, that
brought tears of delicate inner laughter.

There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr. Harte's
demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil,--"Alkali
Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy,
profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had
owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They laid up on the worn
benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck like beached vessels,
and their talk ran on endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother
lode," and worked around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and
the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.

Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these things
written up from the point of view of people who do not do them every day
would get no savor in their speech.

Says Three Finger, relating the history of the Mariposa, "I took it
off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was shot."

Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"

"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around Johnson's wife,
an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."

"Why didn't he work it himself?"

"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to leave the
country pretty quick."

"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.

Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville out into
the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a few rarely
touched water-holes, always, always with the golden hope. They develop
prospects and grow rich, develop others and grow poor but never
embittered. Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold enough,
time enough, and men enough to come after you. And at Jim