Nevertheless, I had the good fortune to learn much of the story of one of these men.  A member of our camping party chanced to make speaking acquaintance with him at the quaint old adobe house under its huge, spreading grapevine and waving cottonwoods, which served as stage station and supply store—­the centre of such civilization as there was in all the region within a radius of thirty or forty miles.  Every one in that country called him “Old Dan.”  I found his name one day in the Great Register—­twin relic, with the shabby old stage, of the outer world—­which hung in the stage station.  But as it was not his real name, nor probably any name by which he was ever known outside of those hills, it will be of no use to mention it here.

Old Dan, learning that we were not pleased with our camping-place, invited us to pitch our tents under some trees near his cabin.  And for one delightful month of the southern summer we brought into his life the strange sensation of voices fresh from the world he had discarded.  The unwonted influence unlocked his memories and sent his mind back to dwell among the almost forgotten years when he, too, was of the world and delighted in it.

We soon fell into the habit of sociability.  Every evening he would come down to our camp, usually bringing his violin, and sit with us for hours at our camp fire.  His cats—­he had near a dozen of them—­came trailing after him, and his two dogs trotted by his side.  Two or three of the cats sprang into his lap as soon as he sat down, and the rest snarled at the dogs for appropriating the choice positions nearest him, and then disposed themselves in an outer row.  The stable inclosure was only a few rods distant, and the three burros it contained, as soon as they heard his voice, ranged themselves in a solemn row at the nearest point, looking as wise and mysterious as so many sphinxes.

Sometimes he played for us, with unexpected skill and feeling, on his violin.  As the days went by and our acquaintance grew more intimate, he gradually fell back into memories of the past and turned over for us, now and then, the pages of his life’s history.  But all these bits, heard at many different times, and some things which were told me afterwards by men who had known him in other years and places, I have gathered into one continuous narrative.  For in my memory they are all fused together, as if he had told us the whole of his story in one evening—­one special evening, of which remembrance is most vivid.

The moon was at its half, and showered down just enough of its silver light to bring out sharply the darkling woods on the hill beyond the little stream and to make his cabin under the trees, off in the opposite direction, take on strange shapes, while it cut out, sharp and distinct against the background of light, the silhouettes of the solemn and unmoving burros, standing in a row behind the fence.  Our camp fire blazed and crackled and the crimson and orange