The Mountains [43]
to pull and stretch at every square inch of that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres. Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone. Now there is nothing on earth that seems to dry slower than buckskin. You wear your fingers down to the first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for future use, you carry the hide to your instructor.
"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.
You go back and do it some more, putting the entire strength of your body, soul, and religious convictions into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant declares it will not do.
"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it isn't dry. Go to it!"
But at this point your outraged soul arches its back and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You KNOW it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of the camp.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one 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 of long years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the face of the earth. The old man had wintered here, summered a thousand miles away, made his strike at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully tried for a repetition of his luck at the other. I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though always of course in the background, was ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the
"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.
You go back and do it some more, putting the entire strength of your body, soul, and religious convictions into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant declares it will not do.
"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it isn't dry. Go to it!"
But at this point your outraged soul arches its back and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You KNOW it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of the camp.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one 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 of long years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the face of the earth. The old man had wintered here, summered a thousand miles away, made his strike at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully tried for a repetition of his luck at the other. I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though always of course in the background, was ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the