“A new band?” asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.

“Yes,” said I, “and half an inch wider.”  I had had a new band five days before.

“I meets a man one night,” said Finch, beginning his story—­“a man brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in Schlagel’s.  That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for No. 98.  His discourse runs to the subject of gold.  He says that certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it.  He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.

“‘Oh, Geronimo!’ says I.  ‘Indians!  There’s no Indians in the South,’ I tell him, ’except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods trade.  The Indians are all on the reservations,’ says I.

“‘I’m telling you this with reservations,’ says he.  ’They ain’t Buffalo Bill Indians; they’re squattier and more pedigreed.  They call ’em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico.  They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,’ says the brown man, ’and fill quills with it; and then they empty ’em into red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba each—­an arroba is twenty-five pounds—­and store it in a stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over the door.’

“‘How do they work off this unearth increment?’ I asks.

“‘They don’t,’ says the man.  ’It’s a case of “Ill fares the land with the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain’t any reciprocity."’

“After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I couldn’t believe him.  And a month afterward I landed on the coast of this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years.  I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly.  I loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and safety-razors.  I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a mule-driver and an interpreter too.  It turned out that he could interpret mules all right, but he drove the English language much too hard.  His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.

“Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it took us nine days to find it.  But one afternoon McClintock led the other mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice five thousand feet deep, it seemed to me.  The hoofs of the beasts drummed on it just like before George M. Cohan makes his first entrance on the stage.

“This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets.  Some few yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking about like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em.  Out of the biggest house, that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white man, red as a beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, with a gold chain around his neck, smoking a cigar.  I’ve seen United States Senators of his style of features and build, also head-waiters and cops.