And his sayin’ nothing sounded good, too, for my ear-drums were jarred clear to my ankles. I found out later that he wasn’t always silent. He was a sort of human layer-cake that way—big slabs of talk and thin streaks of keeping still.
He didn’t look quite like a cow-boy. Cow-boys’ eyes is all puckered up by sun and wind. Nor quite like a miner. His hands was white but they wasn’t tin-horn’s hands, not by no means. He wasn’t drunk, and I couldn’t understand him at all, so I felt around.
“Stranger?” says I. He nods.
“Miner?”
“Once.”
“Cow-boy?”
“Once. Everything else—once. Just now I am a numismatist.”
I set down by him to show that didn’t make no difference to me.
“Is it—very bad?” I says, kinder solemn and hushed-like.
“A collector of rare coins,” he explains, laughing. His laugh was good, too.