chump enough to do that
for a dollar a hide?" you inquire.

"Sure," say they.

"Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his dates," you conclude.

About a week later one of your companions drags out of the alforja
something crumpled that resembles in general appearance and texture a
rusted five-gallon coal-oil can that has been in a wreck. It is only
imperceptibly less stiff and angular and cast-iron than rawhide.

"What is this?" the discoverer inquires.

Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place before recognition
brings inevitable--and sickening--chaff. For you know it at a glance.
It is your buckskin.

Along about the middle of that century an old prospector with four
burros descended the Basin Trail and went into camp just below us.
Towards evening he sauntered in.

I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you just as he came down
through the fire-lit trees. He was about six feet tall, very leanly
built, with a weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was superimposed
a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-brows. These had originally been
brown, but the sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable
contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight twinkled far down
beneath the shadows of the brows and a floppy old sombrero hat. The
usual flannel shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter
completed the outfit. He might have been forty, but was probably
nearer sixty years of age.

"Howdy, boys," said he, and dropped to the fireside, where he promptly
annexed a coal for his pipe.

We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell to him and Wes. It was
commonplace talk enough from one point of view: taken in essence it was
merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized man as to another's
itinerary--"Did you visit Florence? Berlin? St. Petersburg?"--and then
the comparing of impressions. Only here again that old familiar magic
of unfamiliar names threw its glamour over the terse sentences.

"Over beyond the Piute Monument," the old prospector explained, "down
through the Inyo Range, a leetle north of Death Valley--"

"Back in seventy-eight when I was up in Bay Horse Canon over by Lost
River--"

"Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains?--North of th' Telescope
Range?--"

That was all there was to it, with long pauses for drawing at the
pipes. Yet somehow in the aggregate that catalogue of names gradually
established in the minds of us two who listened an impression