particular local color fading from the West, he did what he

considered the only safe thing, and carried his young impression
away to be worked out untroubled by any newer fact. He should have

gone to Jimville. There he would have found cast up on the
ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of more tales, and better

ones.
You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a

survival, like the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes
cheerfully about those borders some thousands of years beyond his

proper epoch. Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere
favorable to the type of a half century back, if not

"forty-niners," of that breed. It is said of Jimville that getting
away from it is such a piece of work that it encourages permanence

in the population; the fact is that most have been drawn there by
some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would deny the

difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder,
I who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor

body. Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from
anywhere in particular. North or south, after the railroad there

is a stage journey of such interminablemonotony as induces
forgetfulness of all previous states of existence.

The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old
stage-coaches bought up from superseded routes the West over,

rocking, lumbering, wide vehicles far gone in the odor of romance,
coaches that Vasquez has held up, from whose high seats express

messengers have shot or been shot as their luck held. This is to
comfort you when the driver stops to rummage for wire to mend a

failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing to quite
prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that all

that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land,

with a hint in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a
palpitant, white, hot land where the wheels gird at the sand and

the midday heaven shuts it in breathlessly like a tent. So in
still weather; and when the wind blows there is occupation enough

for the passengers, shifting seats to hold down the windward side
of the wagging coach. This is a mere trifle. The Jimville stage

is built for five passengers, but when you have seven, with
four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and

express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which
has been reported to you. In time you learn to engage the high

seat beside the driver, where you get good air and the best
company. Beyond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn;

sharp-cutting walls of narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles
of black rock, intolerable and forbidding. Beyond the lava the

mouths that spewed it out, ragged-lipped, ruined craters
shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as red as a red

heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs and grass. You get
the very spirit of the meaning of that country when you see Little

Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old vent,--a
kind of silly pastoralgentleness that glozes over an elemental

violence. Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a
quiet sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green

scrub; and bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.
The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that,

in fact, is the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully
Boy and Theresa group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading

down to the smelter at the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons
dumped their loads as near to the mill as the slope allowed, and

Jimville grew in between. Above the Gulch begins a pine
wood with sparsely grown thickets of lilac, azalea, and odorous

blossoming shrubs.
Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and

that part of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in
summer paved with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy

yellow flood. All between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins,
pieced out with tin cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing

down to the Silver Dollar saloon. When Jimville was having the
time of its life the Silver Dollar had those same coins let into

the bar top for a border, but the proprietor pried them out when
the glory departed. There are three hundred inhabitants in

Jimville and four bars, though you are not to argue anything from
that.

Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins
discovered the Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim

Jenkins opened an eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the
flap, "Best meals in Jimville, $1.00," and the name stuck.

There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch,
though it tickled no humor. It was Dimmick's squaw from Aurora

way. If Dimmick had been anything except New Englander he would
have called her a mahala, but that would not have bettered his

behavior. Dimmick made a strike, went East, and the squaw who had
been to him as his wife took to drink. That was the bald

way of stating it in the Aurora country. The milk of human
kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too much in speech

lest it lose savor. This is what they did. The woman would have
returned to her own people, being far gone with child, but the

drink worked her bane. By the river of this ravine her pains
overtook her. There Jim Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with

a three days' babe nozzling at her breast. Jim heartened her for
the end, buried her, and walked back to Poso, eighteen miles, the

child poking in the folds of his denim shirt with small mewing
noises, and won support for it from the rough-handed folks of that

place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so named from that day,
and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of

luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him. If
it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a

ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a
mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out

this bubble from your own breath.
You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville

unless you could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as
a lizard does his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the

stage-driver assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House
from the lady barkeeper. The phrase tickled all my

after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an anticipation of Poker
Flat. The stage-driver proved himself really right, though

you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no conventions
and no caste. They work out these things in the personal equation

largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'

quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot
over, in as many pretensions as you can make good.

That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro
dealer of those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going

white-shirted and frock-coated in a community of overalls; and
persuading you that whatever shifts and tricks of the game were

laid to his deal, he could not practice them on a person of your
penetration. But he does. By his own account and the evidence of

his manners he had been bred for a clergyman, and he certainly has
gifts for the part. You find him always in possession of your

point of view, and with an evident though not obtrusive desire to
stand well with you. For an account of his killings, for his way

with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to Brown of
Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His improprieties had a

certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies
who wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors. There were perhaps too many of

them. On the whole, the point of the moral distinctions of
Jimville appears to be a point of honor, with an absence of