ugh in the United States to
keep his tongue going for ever as it does."

One evening a young candidate told him he was going to make a speech,
and very patronizingly asked him to come out and hear him. Old Bab
looked straight at the wall, as if counting the stripes on the paper,
then said, half to himself, "The fact of Balaam's ass making a speech
has had a more demoralizing influence than any other event told in the
Holy Bible; for ever since that time every lineal descendant seems
determined to follow his example."

His face was never relieved by a smile, and his chin stuck out
fearfully: so that one day, when Snapping Andy, who was licensed by the
miners to be the champion growler of the camp, called him "Old Baboon,"
it was as complete as a baptismal ceremony, and he was known by no other
name.

Some women visited him one evening; fallen angels--women with the trail
of the serpent all over them. They gave him a pipe and money, and, above
all, words of encouragement and kindness.

He moodily filled the meerschaum they had brought him, and after driving
a volume of smoke through his nose, looked quietly up and said: "Society
is wrong. These women are not bad women. For my part, I begin to find so
much that is evil in that which the world calls good, and so much that
is good in what the world calls evil, that I refuse to draw a
distinction where God has not."

Then he fired a double-barrelled volley at society through his nose, and
throwing out volume after volume of smoke as a sort of redoubt between
himself and the world he hated, drifted silently into a tropical, golden
land of dreams.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE GOPHER.

And do you remember the man they called The Gopher? Poor old Gopher! His
was another story. He died before Baboon found his fortune, else they
might have set up together, and behind their bull-dogs and grizzlies
growled at the world a day or two with perfect satisfaction. But fate
said otherwise.

The Gopher had always been misunderstood, even from the first. If the
camp held him at arm's length in the old days, it, as a rule, shunned
him now, when new men came in, and murder began to be a word with a
terrible meaning, and even the good Widow almost forgot him.

The camp went down, and cabins were deserted by hundreds. But there was
one cabin that was never vacant; it stood apart from town, on the brown
hill-side, and as it was one of the first, so it promised to be the last
of the