"And there's Phil. You'll see him around. Fine steady chap. Lost his job when the mine he worked in shut down. Long as he was working he was the first in the dining room when I opened the door. He began to miss a breakfast, then a dinner, and finally he didn't show up at all. I supposed he was cooking his own and didn't mention it. Kept his chin up. You could hear him laughing loud as anybody on the bench, but Charlie noticed that once a day Phil would follow his nose over into the mesquite where somebody was sure to share a mulligan stew.
"One day when Phil was sitting alone on the woodpile just outside my kitchen, Charlie sat down beside him. They didn't know I was there. 'Phil,' Charlie says, 'the ditch that carries the runoff up at the spring needs widening. Could you spare a few days to put it in shape?'
"Phil left that bench running, got a pick and shovel and went singing up the road and to this day he doesn't know that Charlie just created that job so he could eat."
I mentioned the fellow with black hair and blue eyes. "He complained of rheumatism and slapped his knees a lot."
"Oh, that's Dutch Barr. It isn't rheumatism. Just a sign he's going on a drunk."
The lanky man with the blond eyebrows and sombre face which lighted so easily to laugh, was Whitey Bill McGarn. "... Never had a worry in his life...."
I learned also that the mountain of malpai which lifts above Shoshone was a burial place for a race of Indians antedating the Piutes and Shoshones. "They buried their dead in a crouching position on their knees, elbows bent, hands at their ears. Old Nancy, who was Sam Yundt's squaw wife before he got rich, says they were buried that way so they would be ready to go quick when the Great Spirit called."
The first rose of dawn was in the sky when I left Myra. "You'll have time enough to look around before breakfast," she told me and recommended a view of the valley from the flat-topped mesa above my cabin. "You can reach the top by climbing up a gully and holding on to the greasewood. You can see the dugouts in Dublin Gulch too. Some real old timers live there."
A sweeping view of the little valley rewarded the climb.
Below, Shoshone lay, tucked away in the mesquite. No honking horns, no clanging cars. No swollen ankles dragging muted chains to bench or counter, desk or machine. Soon faint spirals of smoke leaned from the shanties. Shoshone was awakening. It would wash its face on a slab bench, eat its bacon and eggs, and somebody would go out to look for two million dollars.