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 Cañon over by Lost River—"
"Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains?—North of th' Telescope Range?—"