He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed the salient characteristics.  It was a mobile face, quick-changing to inward mood and thought.  Thinking was in him a visible process.  Ideas chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake.  His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion.  It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue.  Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and experience of the world.

From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a miner’s pick and shovel and gold-pan.  Then he crawled out himself into the open.  He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and camp-smoke.  He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon-garden through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight.  His eyes narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud: 

“Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me!  Talk about your attar o’ roses an’ cologne factories!  They ain’t in it!”

He had the habit of soliloquy.  His quick-changing facial expressions might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard after, repeating, like a second Boswell.

The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its water.  “Tastes good to me,” he murmured, lifting his head and gazing across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  The side-hill attracted his attention.  Still lying on his stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully.  It was a practised eye that traveled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall and back and down again to the edge of the pool.  He scrambled to his feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.

“Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and gold-pan.

He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to stone.  Where the side-hill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of dirt and put it into the gold-pan.  He squatted down, holding the pan in his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream.  Then he imparted to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and out through the dirt and gravel.  The larger and the lighter particles worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of the pan, he spilled out and over the edge.  Occasionally, to expedite matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large pebbles and pieces of rock.