peddle. It's mine--by rights. He was goin' to
tell me where it was, you recollect, and he woulda if I hadn't overfed him
on jam--or if that damn squaw hadn't took a notion for marryin'. I let her
stampede me--and that's where I was wrong. I shoulda stayed."

I was foolish enough to argue with him. I had talked with others about the
mine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines a
gamble) told me that he doubted the whole story. A prospectors' bubble, he
called it. Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular
formation; it ran in porphyry, he said,--and then he ran into mineralogy
too technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, and saw Casey
grin tolerantly.

"Gold is where yuh find it," he retorted, and spat after a hurrying
lizard. "They said gold couldn't be found in that formation around
Goldfield. But they found it, didn't they?"

Casey looked at me steadily for a minute and then came out with what was
really in his mind. "You stake me to grub and a couple of burros an' let
me go hunt the Injun Jim, and I'll locate yuh in on it when I find it. And
if I don't find it, I'll pay yuh back for the outfit. And, anyway, you're
makin' money off'n my bad luck right along, ain't yuh? Wasn't it me you
was writin' up, these last few days?"

"I was--er--reconsidering that devil's lantern yarn you told me, Casey.
But the thing doesn't work out right. It sounds unfinished, as you told
it. I don't know that I can do anything with it, after all." I was
truthful with him; you all remember that I was dissatisfied with the way
Casey ended it. Just walking back across the desert and quitting the
search,--it lacked, somehow, the dramatic climax. I could have built one,
of course. But I wanted to test out my theory that a man like Casey will
live a complete drama if he is left alone. Casey is absolutely natural; he
goes out after life without waiting for it to come to him, and he will
forget all about his own interests to help a stranger,--and above all, he
builds his castles hopefully as a child and seeks always to make them
substantial structures afterwards. If any man can prove my theory, that
man is Casey Ryan. So I led him along to say what dream held him now.

"Unfinished? Sure it's unfinished! I quit, didn't I tell yuh? It ain't
goin' to be finished till I git out and find that mine. I been studyin'
things over. I never seen one of them lights till I started out to find
Injun Jim's m