Magpie Simpkins is Ike Harper’s pardner, and I’m Ike Harper. We owns the Silver Threads mine, four burros, uh little grub and uh desire to find somebody with money to promote us.
Magpie’s physique is impressing, unless yuh views him edgeways, when yuh can’t get more’n uh glimpse. He’s six feet several inches tall, wears uh kind look and uh long mustache, and has the ability to let me into more trouble than man is heir to.
When we gets nine hundred dollars’ worth uh gold out of our placer mine on Plenty Stone Crick, Magpie gets the promoting itch. He orates that in the East is uh tribe uh philanthropists who spend their time hunting for uh shaft to sink their money in.
Also he opines that as uh hunter and finder uh this certain person he can’t be beat or even tied. I protests audibly and often that we ought to let gold enough alone, but when Magpie gets an idea like that it’s all off until he’s proved that my objections were well founded.
Therefore and immediate he packs his valise—or rather one he borrows from Buck Masterson, the saloon-keeper at Piperock, and pilgrims East.
I holds down uh chair on the shady side of our cabin for thirty days, and tries to figure out how long it will take ’em to get Magpie’s nine hundred away from him. He indicates in his departing words that his stay is indefinite and his destination problematical, but he comes back on the thirtieth day.
He pilgrims up from Piperock, with the taste uh ashes in his mouth, uh yaller, hard hat on his head and kid gloves on his hands. I hands him uh welcome and uh cigaret, and he humps up in my chair.
“She’s uh hard drag, Ike,” he states. “The tribe I mentioned is either getting scarce or somebody has declared uh closed season on ’em. I invades Pittsburg and Chicago and other places too numerous to mention, but all I could find was folks who were kind enough to listen while they took uh drink on me. When the drink was gone they all lost their hearing, Ike.”
“Did yuh expect to find capitalists in grog shops?” I asked, chiding like. “Moneyed men don’t get drunk—they gets intoxicated. Didn’t yuh do uh thing to be thankful for, Magpie?”
He shakes his head, sad-like, and fumbles in his pocket. After searching through all his clothes he comes back to the first pocket he looks in, where it was all the time and he knowed it, and pulls out uh letter.