s still
there. He had located his claim and staked his corner. His location
notice, laboriously written with a blunt pencil, was fastened to a
tree. The burro lay in philosophical contemplation in the grass beside
the stream; while his master sat beside the shallow hole that perhaps
marked the beginning of a mine. His pose was that of a sentinel. He
watched the hole with an expectant air, as though from it something
important would presently emerge, and he was waiting to pounce upon it.

Years later when I passed that way again, the hole was no deeper, but
the frayed remnants of the location notice flapped in the breeze.

Only once in a quarter of a century have I seen a prospector hurry. It
was while I was guiding a party of Eastern folks across the Rabbit Ear
range that we met a gangling fellow named "Shorty," by way of contrast.
I say he was hurrying, because he held a straight course across the
mountains without paying heed to numberless diverting leads he
ordinarily would have "sampled."

Shorty was heading for Central City, where mining had been in full
blast for forty years. He had no burro, he had cached his tools at the
scene of his last camp. He had had a dream that revealed to him the
location of a rich vein, right in the midst of miles of mines, but
unsuspected and undiscovered. Every prospector has dreams by day as
well as by night.

My party "loaned" Shorty some grub and watched him disappear toward the
Mecca of his dreams. Just before he left, Shorty confided to us that
his dream vein lay just below a big bowlder and above some tall trees;
that he knew the vein was right there--and it was.

To my cabin one day, came Slide-Rock Pete, who dwelt in a realm of
unreality. Pete was superstitious after the manner of his tribe. He
knew all the luck signs, all the charms (good or bad), and he had
conjured up counter-charms against ill omens. As he approached my
cabin a visiting cat, a black one, crossed his path. Pete promptly
turned around three times in the opposite direction to that in which
the cat had gone and calmly entered, secure in his belief that he had
broken pussy's dark spell. He was afflicted with rheumatism, which
prevented him from prospecting. At length he figured out the cause of
his trouble and a cure for it. It wasn't dampness, or rainy weather,
he told me, but came from camping near mineral deposits. If he chanced
to pitch his camp near mineral, especially iron, it cause