“This is the only square meal I have had since I left the woods,” he said, when they captured him; and he filled his pipe with kin-i-kin-nick and puffed the sweet, mild fumes.  He had returned to his natural element.

“I have been rounding up stock,” he said, “and I shot this buck just over the hill there.  Here, dig in, it is jake.”

He had to live among the steers, and the coyotes, and the wild trails in accordance with his early training; original things were his food.  Society, and his wife, demanded that he remain on the surface, but his aboriginal inclinations lured him to the woods; so, during six months of every year he was an Indian to all intents and purposes.  Early in May he would load a cayuse with beans, bacon, canned milk, frying pan and blankets, and with this treasure he would take to the hills and bask the livelong summer among the junipers, the firs, and the spruces; and he would eat huckleberries, choke-cherries and soap-o-lalies, and smoke kin-i-kin-nick until his complexion assumed the tan of the Chilcoten Indian.

The lure of the limelight had been great, but it had worn off just as soon as he had a surfeit of its false glories.  He found that beans and bacon eaten with a knife were sweeter and more wholesome than “blanc mange,” “consomme,” or “cafe noir” cooked in French style, and served by a French chef.

Of the Too Sure Man

Once upon a time, in the town of Lillooet, county of Lillooet, Province of British Columbia, there lived a man who was so sure of his footing that he closed his eyes and floundered along in the dark.  When people told him there were chasms in front of him, or that there was ice on the trail ahead, he would not believe them, but put his fingers in his ears so that he could not hear, and thus became deaf and blind to his own interests.  The people pestered him so much about his folly, and he learned to hate them so much for their interference in his personal matters, that he crossed the names of all his friends from his list of social possibilities, would recognize none of them, and refused to speak even when addressed; he thus became a blind, deaf and dumb mute.  The result was that he ultimately slipped upon the ice on the trail, and fell into a chasm and has not been seen since.  It was in the first days of the Lillooet quartz discoveries.  Gold had been mined from Cayuse Creek, Bridge River, and the Fraser River, in uncountable ounces, in the free state, by the placer or hydraulic process of mining, for a great number of years, but the source of supply from which the free gold had originated had not yet been located.  It was even doubted if there was any source of supply, although it was generally conceded that all gold was originally pilfered by the streams and rivers from the hard quartz-rocks of which the great mountains of Cayuse Creek and Bridge River were formed.  While some of the miners contented