I need not attempt to deny
that, and I felt his eye watching for signs of geology about me. I told
him that I imagined the geologist must do an active business in Arizona.

"I don't hire 'em!" he exclaimed. "They can't tell me nothing about
mineral."

"I suppose you have been here a long while, Mr. Adams?"

"There's just three living that come in ahead of--" The cough split his
last word in pieces.

"Mr. Mowry was saying last night--"

"You've seen that old scamp, have you? Buy his mine behind Helen's
Dome?"

My mirth at this turned him instantly confidential, and rooted his
conviction that I was a geologist. "That's right!" said he, tapping my
arm. "Don't you let 'em fool you. I guess you know your business. Now,
if you want to look at good paying rock, thousands in sight, in sight,
mind you--"

"Are you coming along with us?" called the little Meakum driver, and I
turned and saw the new team was harnessed and he ready on his box, with
the reins in his hands. So I was obliged to hasten from the disappointed
Adams and climb back in my seat. The last I saw of him he was standing
quite still in the welter of stable muck, stooping to his cough, the
desert sun beating on his old body, and the desert wind slowly turning
the windmill above the shadeless mud hovel in which he lived alone.

"Poor old devil!" said I to my enemy, half forgetting our terms in my
contemplation of Adams. "Is he a Mormon?"

My enemy's temper seemed a little improved. "He's tried most everything
except jail," he answered, his voice still harsh. "You needn't invest
your sentiment there. He used to hang out at Twenty Mile in Old Camp
Grant days, and he'd slit your throat for fifty cents."

But my sentiment was invested somehow. The years of the old-timers were
ending so gray. Their heyday, and carousals, and happy-go-luckiness all
gone, and in the remaining hours--what? Empty youth is such a grand easy
thing, and empty age so grim!

"Has Mowry tried everything, too?" I asked.

"Including jail," said my companion; and gave me many entertaining
incidents of Mowry's career with an ill-smelling saloon cleverness that
put him once more into favorable humor with me, while I retained my
opinion of him. "And that uneducated sot," he concluded, "that hobo with
his record of cattle-stealing and claim-jumping, and his acquittal from
jail through railroad influence, actually undertook to run against me
last elections. My name is Jenks; Luke Jenks, T