“Like manna from heaven, that sounds,” Goodrich returned. “I haven’t had a smoke all day. My partner hiked out to the stage road yesterday to try and rustle some tobacco and grub. Well, the coffee will boil in a minute. Stake your mule over there by mine. There’s good feed.”
The stranger passed Goodrich a sack of tobacco. He undid his pack lashings and laid off the load and saw-buck saddle, watered his beast at the small, cold spring which bubbled from under the roots of the pine by which Goodrich had his camp, and picketed him among tall grass and pea vine. When he came back Goodrich had the breast of a grouse frying. The stranger produced bread from his pack. They ate and smoked, talking a little.
“Going to hunt up here in the pines?” Goodrich asked at length.
“I’m hunting—a job,” the other said. “Heading for a logging camp at the mouth of Slate Creek. Short cut across the divide.”
Goodrich turned into his blankets. He wanted to be out in the morning before sunrise sent the deer back to inaccessible thickets. The stranger gathered ferns and grass for a mattress and likewise spread his blankets. In a matter of minutes both men were asleep.
Until an hour before dawn Goodrich slept soundly. Then he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and reached for his boots. Even in California four thousand feet in the air brings a chill before dawn, any month in the year. Goodrich had a brown shooting coat at the head of his bed. When he pawed around in the dark he could not find it, only a woolen something where his coat should have been. Impatiently he struck a match. His coat was gone. A red sweater lay in its place.
He held the match above his head. In the still air it burned steadily, showing him a vacant pile of ferns and grass where the other man had made his bed.
“Huh,” Goodrich grunted. He sat on his haunches a second, thinking, listening, until the match burned to a charred stub. Then he lit his fire. In the halo that cast he began to look about him, to take stock.
Goodrich had a black burro picketed in the grass. He had a .25-.35 Winchester standing against a tree. He had laid a tattered old gray felt hat near the brown shooting coat when he went to bed.
All these things were gone. But he had not been robbed. Far from it. In the place of his black mule, an indifferent sort of beast, he had a stout young gray burro. In lieu of his old .25-.35 a nearly new .30-.30 carbine leaned against the tree, a well-filled cartridge belt beside—and hooked by the string to the lever hung a sack of tobacco and a book of brown papers. In the hat exchange he had come by a new black Stetson.