ess, as he had hopes of presently entering a profitable
business, but with no further allusions to his precipitate departure,
nor any suggestion of a reason for it. For two or three days Uncle
Billy was staggered and bewildered; in his profound simplicity he
wondered if his extraordinary good fortune that night had made him deaf
to some explanation of his partner's, or, more terrible, if he had
shown some "low" and incredible intimation of taking his partner's
extravagant bet as real and binding. In this distress he wrote to
Uncle Jim an appealing and apologetic letter, albeit somewhat
incoherent and inaccurate, and bristling with misspelling, camp slang,
and old partnership jibes. But to this elaborate epistle he received
only Uncle Jim's repeated assurances of his own bright prospects, and
his hopes that his old partner would be more fortunate, single-handed,
on the old claim. For a whole week or two Uncle Billy sulked, but his
invincible optimism and good humor got the better of him, and he
thought only of his old partner's good fortune. He wrote him
regularly, but always to one address--a box at the San Francisco
post-office, which to the simple-minded Uncle Billy suggested a certain
official importance. To these letters Uncle Jim responded regularly
but briefly.

From a certain intuitive pride in his partner and his affection, Uncle
Billy did not show these letters openly to the camp, although he spoke
freely of his former partner's promising future, and even read them
short extracts. It is needless to say that the camp did not accept
Uncle Billy's story with unsuspecting confidence. On the contrary, a
hundred surmises, humorous or serious, but always extravagant, were
afloat in Cedar Camp. The partners had quarreled over their
clothes--Uncle Jim, who was taller than Uncle Billy, had refused to
wear his partner's trousers. They had quarreled over cards--Uncle Jim
had discovered that Uncle Billy was in possession of a "cold deck," or
marked pack. They had quarreled over Uncle Billy's carelessness in
grinding up half a box of "bilious pills" in the morning's coffee. A
gloomily imaginative mule-driver had darkly suggested that, as no one
had really seen Uncle Jim leave the camp, he was still there, and his
bones would yet be found in one of the ditches; while a still more
credulous miner averred that what he had thought was the cry of a
screech-owl the night previous to Uncle Jim's disappearance, might hav