himself in a
mood for talk. His pack burros in hobbles strayed off to hunt for a
wetter mouthful than the sage afforded, and gave him no concern.

We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes, or by
water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his way of
life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of no
character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of
taking on the protective color of his surroundings. His clothes were of
no fashion that I could remember, except that they bore liberal markings
of 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