For a man who had found compensation for such luck, there is no defeat. Certainly his philosophy seemed to meet his needs and that is the function of philosophy.
It was cool in the late evening and he made a fire, chucked one end of an eight-foot log into the stove and put a chair under the protruding end. Bill asked why he didn’t cut the log. “Listen,” Blackie said, “you’re one of 100 million reasons why this country is misgoverned. Why should I sweat over that log when a fire will do the job?... That book? Just some fellow’s plan for a perfect world. I hope I’ll not be around when they have it.
“The town of Calico? It was a live one. When John McBryde and Lowery Silver discovered the white metal there, a lot of us desert rats got in the big money. In the first seven years of the Eighties it was bonanza and in the eighth the town was dead.”
But the stories of fortunes made in Mule and Odessa Canyons were of less importance to him than a habit of the town judge. “Chewed tobacco all the time and swallowed the juice, ‘If a fellow’s guts can’t stand it,’ he would say, ‘he ought to quit,’ and he’d clap a fine on anybody who spat in his court.
“Never knew Jack Dent, did you? Englishman. Now there was a drinking man. Said his only ambition was to die drunk. One pay day he got so cockeyed he couldn’t stand, so his pals laid him on a pool table and went on with their drinking. Every time they ordered, Jack hollered for his and somebody would take it over and pour it down him. ‘Keep ’em comin’,’ he says. ‘If I doze off, just pry my jaws open and pour it down.’
“The boys took him at his word. Every time they drank, they took a drink to Jack. When the last round came they took Jack a big one. They tried to pry his lips open but the lips didn’t give. Jack Dent’s funeral was the biggest ever held in the town.
“Bill was telling you I made a million there, and every now and then I hear of somebody telling somebody else I made a million in Africa. And another in the Yukon. The truth is, what little I’ve got came out of a hole in a whiskey barrel instead of a mine shaft.
“A few years back a strike was made down in the Avawatz that started a baby gold rush. I joined it. A fellow named Gypsum came in with a barrel of whiskey, thinking there’d be a town, but it didn’t turn out that way. Gypsum had no trouble disposing of his liquor and stayed around to do a little prospecting. One day when I was starting for Johannesburg, he asked me to deliver a message to a bartender there. Gypsum had a meat cleaver in his hand and was sharpening it on a butcher’s steel to cut up a mountain sheep he’d killed.
“‘Just ask for Klondike and tell him to send my stuff. He’ll understand. Tell him if he doesn’t send it, I’m coming after it.’
“I didn’t know at the time that Gypsum had killed three men in honest combat and that one of them had been dispatched with a meat cleaver.