AMERICAN FORESTRY 



659 



the earth. Ignoring me in a manner that stamped me as 

 a tenderfoot, he asked Pete, the packer, if he had any 

 "chewin'." 



Pete silently handed him a plug of tobacco, that all 

 but disappeared behind the hairy front, which imme- 

 diately and silently began working upon the biggest 

 chew of tobacco I have ever seen taken. He deigned no 

 reply to Pete's remark that he might better have kept 

 the plug and returned the chew, nor gave any sign of 

 gratitude, save by a slight moisture in his sun-reddened, 

 grey eyes. The silence, for some minutes, was broken 

 only by the hiss of tobacco juice as he spat at a small 

 rock that seemed particularly placed by nature as a tar- 

 get. Finally, this sort of chewing sphinx apparently felt 

 that he had reduced his hunk of "miners' candy" to a 

 constituency that justified letting up on the helpless thing 

 for, as I was about to frame a question, he turned to me 

 and said : 



"Son, I've got a mine about a mile lower down and 

 it's good, if anyone can figger a way to git machinery in 

 and ore out of 'er. On my way up, I lost part o' mv 

 pack and all o' my terbaccy. While I was a-sittin' here, 

 tryin' ter decide whether ter go back for terbaccy an' 

 another whirl at the old mine, a idea struck me. Settin' 

 on top o' the world here, where you kin look straight 



down about two mile, sorter wakes a feller up an' a settin' 

 here, I figgered how I could work that ole mine. All I 

 needed then ter make this view perfect, was a plug o' 

 Honey Dip Twist." 



Pete reminded him that he was chewing on a hog's 

 share of one at that moment. 



"Sure," he said. "I guess this is my lucky day. If 

 those desert rats 'd run up here oncet in a while, I b'lieve 

 they'd git enough ideas ter make them Bodie Mines pay 

 big. You see, up here, you're two or three mile nearer 

 God," (pointing to the Owens River, 10,000 feet below, 

 which looked like nothing so much as a fine silver thread 

 reaching toward Death Valley, over 14,000 feet below 

 us), "and mebbe that's how come these idees so fresh and 

 easy like." 



We talked about mines and mountains, and left him 

 adjusting the pack to a tiny burro which had been nod- 

 ding in the shade of a huge boulder. All thoughts of 

 this curious philosopher were banished by the glorious 

 scene over the Owens River Valley, as we followed the 

 trail that led down, down, down, to the little town of In- 

 dependence. 



During the last half mile of descent the rays of the 

 setting sun and the shadow of the range we were on 

 slowly crept up the Panamints until only the tops were 



FISH CREEK C.-^NYON, APACHE TRAIL, ARIZONA 

 The canyons of Arizona seem to have supplied the colors of the world in making. Purples, greens, blues, scarlets and tawny browns shift and 



play with kaleidoscopic variety as the sun passes overhead. 



