I was foolish enough to argue with him.  I had talked with others about the mine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines a gamble) told me that he doubted the whole story.  A prospectors’ bubble, he called it.  Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular formation; it ran in porphyry, he said,—­and then he ran into mineralogy too technical for me now.  I repeated his statement, however, and saw Casey grin tolerantly.

“Gold is where yuh find it,” he retorted, and spat after a hurrying lizard.  “They said gold couldn’t be found in that formation around Goldfield.  But they found it, didn’t they?”

Casey looked at me steadily for a minute and then came out with what was really in his mind.  “You stake me to grub and a couple of burros an’ let me go hunt the Injun Jim, and I’ll locate yuh in on it when I find it.  And if I don’t find it, I’ll pay yuh back for the outfit.  And, anyway, you’re makin’ money off’n my bad luck right along, ain’t yuh?  Wasn’t it me you was writin’ up, these last few days?”

“I was—­er—­reconsidering that devil’s lantern yarn you told me, Casey.  But the thing doesn’t work out right.  It sounds unfinished, as you told it.  I don’t know that I can do anything with it, after all.”  I was truthful with him; you all remember that I was dissatisfied with the way Casey ended it.  Just walking back across the desert and quitting the search,—­it lacked, somehow, the dramatic climax.  I could have built one, of course.  But I wanted to test out my theory that a man like Casey will live a complete drama if he is left alone.  Casey is absolutely natural; he goes out after life without waiting for it to come to him, and he will forget all about his own interests to help a stranger,—­and above all, he builds his castles hopefully as a child and seeks always to make them substantial structures afterwards.  If any man can prove my theory, that man is Casey Ryan.  So I led him along to say what dream held him now.

“Unfinished?  Sure it’s unfinished!  I quit, didn’t I tell yuh?  It ain’t goin’ to be finished till I git out and find that mine.  I been studyin’ things over.  I never seen one of them lights till I started out to find Injun Jim’s mine.  If I’d a-gone along with no bad luck, I wouldn’t never a-found that tenderfoot camp, would I?  It was keepin’ the light at my back done that—­and William not likin’ the look of it, either.  And you gotta admit it was the light mostly that scared them young dudes off and left me the things.  And if you’d of saw Injun Jim, you’d of known same as I that it was the jam and the silk shirts that loosened him up.  Nothin’ in my own pack coulda won him over,—­”

“It’s all right that far,” I cut in.  “But then he died, and you were set afoot and all but married by as venomous a creature as I ever heard of, and the thing stops right there, Casey, where it shouldn’t.”