Never was more diverting talk than that which ranged around the room where we sat in easy attitudes, with feet cocked up and chairs tilted, in the soft light of Hamilton’s well-shaded lamps and in a deepening density of tobacco-smoke. And the talk was catholic in its range, for the editor was an authority on local and state and national politics, and, as a recent convert to “free silver,” he could argue its cause with all the fervor of a novice. The barrister was a man of liberal education who had taught the classics and loved them, and who could, with real enthusiasm, lead the talk back from all things modern to
“--those old days which poets say were golden.”
And the mine superintendent, for all his shrewd and efficient practicality--for he was counted the best superintendent in the camp who, in the face of the declining price of silver and of other difficulties as great, had accomplished marvels with his mine--was profoundly interested in Biblical criticism; he could speak with the knowledge of a theologian on the authorship of the Pentateuch and the question of the inerrancy of Scripture and the authenticity and genuineness of the synoptic Gospels.
But I liked most of all to hear Hamilton as he would sit left ankle crossing his right knee, his right foot tip-toe on the floor balancing his tilted chair, and his guitar resting on his lap. Over the strings his great strong fingers would pass, striking soft harmonies, and his handsome, manly face would respond to the free play of emotion as in his rich voice and with unconscious vividness of camp speech he would talk of life and of its revelations to him throughout his varied history.
“I have had every experience but that of death,” he said very quietly to me one day, when we had come to know each other well. As I watched him and saw his innate, thoughtful courtesy to women, and his strong, tender-hearted love of little children, and the frankness of his life, and his useful efficiency as a man, and his devotion to the truth, and his utter hatred of all cowardice and hypocrisy, I began to understand what royal possibilities there are in the men who prove best fitted to survive in the struggle of the frontier.
It was Hamilton who introduced me to Price. Price shall stand for the name of a prospector of a sort that is becoming rare at the West. The son of an officer in an Irish regiment, he was brought to America in his early boyhood and was reared on the Pacific coast. But the strictures of high civilization were too much for him, and long before he was out of his teens he was living the rough, fortuitous life of the mining camps and cattle tracts of the Southwest. Price is about forty now, and his range of occupation includes almost everything from a “burro puncher” to a member of the Legislature of Arizona. He seems to know, moreover, every trail in the two Territories and every soul along them, to the very Indians and “greasers” of the youngest generation, and he is just the sort who is looked upon out here as likely at any time “to strike it rich.” So far, however, he has not struck it rich; very much the reverse. In the spring he punched his burros up from Phœnix to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and prospected there all summer, but with no luck. When Hamilton introduced me to him, his burros were in hock and so were his blankets and his very cooking utensils and even his “gun,” and he was longing for the means to redeem them that he might get out of the bitter cold of the mountains and down into the balmy Indian summer of the Salt River Valley which was “God’s country” to him.