down
beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley, to hear about the
green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in London years before, and
that was the first I had known of his having been abroad. It was after
one of his "big strikes" that he had made the Grand Tour, and had
brought nothing away from it but the green canvas bags, which he
conceived would fit his needs, and an ambition. This last was nothing
less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently
bourgeois of London. It seemed that the situation of the wealthy English
middle class, with just enough gentility above to aspire to, and
sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his
imagination, though of course he did not put it so crudely as that. It
was no news to me then, two or three years after, to learn that he had
taken ten thousand dollars from an abandoned claim, just the sort of
luck to have pleased him, and gone to London to spend it. The land
seemed not to miss him any more than it had minded him, but I missed him
and could not forget the trick of expecting him in least likely
situations. Therefore it was with a pricking sense of the familiar that
I followed a twilight trail of smoke, a year or two later, to the swale
of a dripping spring, and came upon a man by the fire with a coffee-pot
and frying-pan. I was not surprised to find it was the Pocket Hunter. No
man can be stronger than his destiny.

SHOSHONE LAND

It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long before, I
had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy mist of
reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in the
light that never was. Sitting on the golden slope at the campoodie,
looking across the Bitter Lake to the purple tops of Mutarango, the
medicine-man drew up its happy places one by one, like little blessed
islands in a sea of talk. For he was born a Shoshone, was Winnenap'; and
though his name, his wife, his children, and his tribal relations were
of the Paiutes, his thoughts turned homesickly toward Shoshone Land.
Once a Shoshone always a Shoshone. Winnenap' lived gingerly among the
Paiutes and in his heart despised them. But he could speak a tolerable
English when he would, and he always would if it were of Shoshone Land.

He had come into the keeping of the Paiutes as a hostage for the long
peace which the authority of the whites made interminable, and, though
there was now no order in the tribe,