ity which they themselves had witnessed.

He had been seen crossing the "flume" that spanned Grizzly Canyon at a
height of nine hundred feet, on a plank six inches wide. He had tumbled
down the "shoot" to the South Fork, a thousand feet below, and was found
sitting on the riverbank "without a scratch, 'cept that he was lazily
givin' himself with his off hind paw." He had been forgotten in a
snowdrift on a Sierran shelf, and had come home in the early spring with
the conceited complacency of an Alpine traveler and a plumpness alleged
to have been the result of an exclusive diet of buried mail bags and
their contents. He was generally believed to read the advance election
posters, and disappear a day or two before the candidates and the brass
band--which he hated--came to the Ridge. He was suspected of having
overlooked Colonel Johnson's hand at poker, and of having conveyed to
the Colonel's adversary, by a succession of barks, the danger of betting
against four kings.

While these statements were supplied by wholly unsupported witnesses, it
was a very human weakness of Rattlers Ridge that the responsibility of
corroboration was passed to the dog himself, and HE was looked upon as a
consummate liar.

"Snoopin' round yere, and CALLIN' yourself a poker sharp, are ye! Scoot,
you yaller pizin!" was a common adjuration whenever the unfortunate
animal intruded upon a card party. "Ef thar was a spark, an ATOM of
truth in THAT DOG, I'd believe my own eyes that I saw him sittin' up and
trying to magnetize a jay bird off a tree. But wot are ye goin' to do
with a yaller equivocator like that?"

I have said that he was yellow--or, to use the ordinary expression,
"yaller." Indeed, I am inclined to believe that much of the ignominy
attached to the epithet lay in this favorite pronunciation. Men who
habitually spoke of a "YELLOW bird," a "YELLOW-hammer," a "YELLOW leaf,"
always alluded to him as a "YALLER dog."

He certainly WAS yellow. After a bath--usually compulsory--he presented
a decided gamboge streak down his back, from the top of his forehead to
the stump of his tail, fading in his sides and flank to a delicate straw
color. His breast, legs, and feet--when not reddened by "slumgullion,"
in which he was fond of wading--were white. A few attempts at ornamental
decoration from the India-ink pot of the storekeeper failed, partly
through the yellow dog's excessive agility, which would never give the
paint time to dry on him, and