ter holes, and have told the white men with whom they
made friends after a fashion--for Casey tells me he never knew a red man
who was essentially noble--and these have told others; and men have named
the springs and have indicated their location on maps. Otherwise the land
is dry, parched and deadly and beautiful, and men have died terrible,
picturesque deaths within its borders.

I was thinking of that, and it seemed not too incongruous that the devil
should now and then walk abroad with a lantern of his own devising to make
men shrink from his path. But Casey says, and I think he means it, that
the light is a lure. He told me a weird adventure of his own to back his
argument, but I thought he was inventing most of it as he went along.
Until I saw that light on Tippipah I had determined to let his romancing
go in at one ear if it must, and stop there without running out at the
tips of my fingers. Casey has enough ungodly adventures that are true. I
didn't feel called upon to repeat his Irish inventions.

But now I'm going to tell you. If you can't believe it I shall not blame
you; but Casey swears that it is all true. It's worth beginning where
Casey did, at the beginning. And that goes back to when he was driving
stage in the Yellowstone.

Casey was making the trip out, one time, and he had just one passenger
because it was at the end of the season and there had been a week of nasty
weather that had driven out most of the sightseers and no new ones were
coming in. This man was a peevish, egotistical sort, I imagine; at any
rate he did a lot of talking about himself and his ill luck, and he told
Casey of his misfortunes by the hour.

Casey did not mind that much. He says he didn't listen half the time. But
finally the fellow began talking of the wealth that is wasted on folks who
can't use it properly or even appreciate the good fortune.

To illustrate that point he told a story that set Casey's mind to seeing
visions. The man told about an old Indian who lived in dirt and a
government blanket and drank bad whisky when he could get it, and whipped
his squaw and behaved exactly like other Indians. Yet that old Indian knew
where gold lay so thick that he could pick out pieces of crumbly rock all
plastered with free gold. He was too lazy to dig out enough to do him any
good. He would come into the nearest town with a rusty old lard bucket
full of high grade so rich that the storekeeper once got five hundred
dollars f