About this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of interest to me, from the fact that it came so near “instigating” my funeral.  At a time when an Indian attack had been expected, the citizens hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand when wanted.  A neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never thought of it again.  We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub.  The ancient stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face.  Finally it occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of water.  Then he returned to his tub.

I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind.  Fragments of it fell in the streets full two hundred yards away.  Nearly a third of the shed roof over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond.  I was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless.  But the Indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort.  He simply stopped washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked: 

“Mph!  Dam stove heap gone!”—­and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do.  I will explain, that “heap” is “Injun-English” for “very much.”  The reader will perceive the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance.

Chapter XL.  I now come to a curious episode—­the most curious, I think, that had yet accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career.  Out of a hillside toward the upper end of the town, projected a wall of reddish looking quartz-croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that extended deep down into the earth, of course.  It was owned by a company entitled the “Wide West.”  There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the rock that came from it—­and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing extraordinary.  I will remark here, that although to the inexperienced stranger all the quartz of a particular “district” looks about alike, an old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock, separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article.