and unexpected
confirmation. For instance, the manner in which he earned his
sobriquet of "Hydraulic" Smith I thought was pure fable, but no less a
man than his former employer said that it was fact in every essential.
Smith got his front name while working in a big hydraulic camp in
Idaho. He was nozzleman. One day in an unusually merry mood he turned
the monitor loose on a crowd of Chinamen who were working over tailings.

[Illustration: "Hy" Smith]

"And if ever you saw felt shoes and pigtails flying in the air 'twas
then," said Hy. "It looked for all the world like Old Faithful had
spouted in a poll-parrot cage. I don't know why I done it, no more
than the man in the moon--it was one of them idees that takes hold of
you, and gets put through before you can more'n realise you're thinking
of it--but it was the greatest success of its kind I ever see. We had
a two-hundred-foot head of water and a six-inch stream, and I might say
that there was a yaller haze of Chinamen in the atmosphere for the next
ten seconds. I piped one Charley-boy right over the top of a
tool-shed. Well, our boss was a mighty kind-hearted man, and when that
crowd of spitting, foaming, gargling, gobbling Chinamen went to him,
and begun to pour out their troubles like several packs of
fire-crackers going off to oncet, waving all the arms and legs I hadn't
knocked out of commission, he was het up considerable. He never waited
to hear my side of the story, but just rolled up his pants and waded
into me up to the hocks; he read me my pedigree from Adam's wife's
sister down to now, and there wasn't a respectable person in it,
according to him.

"I didn't like it, and I made a swipe for him with a shovel, but he was
too soople for me, and of all the lickings I ever got, that is the one
I don't want to remember the most: he did a sort of double-shuffle
fandango on my back, while he brought my legs into the argument with a
sluice rake.

"When he asked me if I had had enough, I told him I thought it would do
for the present, because, as a matter of fact, if all I had more than
enough was money in the bank, I wouldn't have done no more work for the
rest of my days.

"So then he calls me up and gives me my time, and I must say he treated
me square when he said good-bye.

"'You're the best darn man on a monitor lever that I ever did see,'
says he, 'but anywheres else you're the foolest combine of small boy
and dare-devil, and some other queer