Thus it was I came to hire Timberline.
Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of him at the corral, and these proved his sole visible property of any kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it; most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse—and in that country in those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost anybody.
But he was not unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags, and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of the first sunrise on Broke Axle, and this proved a not too rare habit with him, which made all the more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes I bought and gave him as we passed through Lander.
“Timberline,” said Scipio the next day, “if Anthony Comstock came up in this country he’d jail you.”
“Who’s he?” screamed Timberline, sharply.
“He lives in Noo York, and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is getting close on to what they claim Venus and other immoral Greek statuary used to wear.”
After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but on one of his wash-days we discovered that he kept the rags next his skin! This clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month. His poor little pay at Rongis, which we gradually learned they had always got back from him by one trick or another, was less than half what I now gave him for his services, and I offered to advance him some of this at places where it could be spent; but he told me to keep it until he had earned the whole of it.
Waiting for nothing was stamped plain upon him from head to foot