Oddly enough they allowed this boy to keep his name. They called him Little Billie Piper.
He was an enigma to the miners. Sometimes he looked to be only fifteen. Then again he was very thoughtful. The fair brow was wrinkled sometimes; there were lines, sabre cuts of time, on the fair delicate face, and then he looked to be at least double that age.
He worked, or at least he went out to work, every day with his pick and pan and shovel; but almost always they saw him standing by the running stream, looking into the water, dreaming, seeing in Nature's mirror the snowy clouds that blew in moving mosaic overhead and through and over the tops of the tossing firs.
He rarely spoke to the men more than in monosyllables. Yet when he did speak to them his language was so refined, so far above their common speech, and his voice was so soft, and his manner so gentle that they saw in him, in some sort, a superior.
Yet Limber Tim, the boy-man, came pretty near to this boy's life. At least he stood nearer to his heart than any one. Their lives were nearer the same level. One Sunday they stood together on the hill by the graveyard above the Forks.
"Tell me," said the boy, laying his hand on the arm of his companion, and looking earnestly and sadly in his face, "Tell me, Tim, why it is that they always have the graveyard on a hill. Is it because it is a little nearer to heaven?"
His companion did not understand. And yet he did understand, and was silent.
They sat down together by and by and looked up out of the great cañon at the drifting white clouds, and the boy said, looking into heaven, as if to himself,
"O! fleets of clouds that flee before
The burly winds of upper seas."
Then as the sudden twilight fell and they went down the hill together, the white crooked moon, as if it had just been broken from off the snow peak that it had been hiding behind, came out with a star.