Part 14

We began with great ingenuity by constructing a graining-tool out of a table-knife. We bound it with rawhide, and encased it with wood, and wrapped it with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is proper. After this we hunted out a very smooth, barkless log, laid the hide across it, straddled it, and began graining.

Graining is a delightful process. You grasp the tool by either end, hold the square edge at a certain angle, and push away from you mightily. A half-dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair; twice as many more will scrape away half as much of the seal-brown grain, exposing the white of the hide. Then, if you want to, you can stop and establish in your mind a definite proportion between the amount thus exposed, the area remaining unexposed, and the muscular fatigue of these dozen and a half of mighty pushes. The proportion will be wrong. You have left out of account the fact that you are going to get almighty sick of the job; that your arms and upper back are going to ache shrewdly before you are done; and that as you go on it is going to be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges firmly enough to offer the required resistance to your knife. Besides--if you get careless--you'll scrape too hard: hence little holes in the completed buckskin. Also--if you get careless--you will probably leave the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of them means a hard transparent spot in the product. Furthermore, once having started in on the job, you are like the little boy who caught the trolley: you cannot let go. It must be finished immediately, all at one heat, before the hide stiffens.

Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evaporated, and you are thinking of fifty pleasant things you might just as well be doing.

Next you revel in grease,--lard oil, if you have it; if not, then lard, or the product of boiled brains. This you must rub into the skin. You rub it in until you suspect that your finger-nails have worn away, and you glisten to the elbows like an Eskimo cutting blubber.

By the merciful arrangement of those who invented buckskin, this entitles you to a rest. You take it--for several days--until your conscience seizes you by the scruff of the neck.

Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy, soggy, snaky, cold bundle of greasy horror to the bank of the creek, and there for endless hours you wash it. The grease is more reluctant to enter the stream than you are in the early morning. Your hands turn purple. The others go by on their way to the trout-pools, but you are chained to the stake.

By and by you straighten your back with creaks, and walk home like a stiff old man, carrying your hide rid of all superfluous oil. Then if you are just learning how, your instructor examines the result.

"That's all right," says he cheerfully. "Now when it dries, it will be buckskin."

That encourages you. It need not. For during the process of drying it must be your pastime constantly to pull and stretch at every square inch of that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres. Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone. Now there is nothing on earth that seems to dry slower than buckskin. You wear your fingers down to the first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for future use, you carry the hide to your instructor.

"Just beginning to dry nicely," says he.

You go back and do it some more, putting the entire strength of your body, soul, and religious convictions into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant declares it will not do.

"It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, "but it isn't dry. Go to it!"

But at this point your outraged soul arches its back and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You KNOW it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of the camp.

"Do you mean to tell me that there is any one chump enough to do that for a dollar a hide?" you inquire.

"Sure," say they.

"Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his dates," you conclude.

About a week later one of your companions drags out of the alforja something crumpled that resembles in general appearance and texture a rusted five-gallon coal-oil can that has been in a wreck. It is only imperceptibly less stiff and angular and cast-iron than rawhide.

"What is this?" the discoverer inquires.

Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place before recognition brings inevitable--and sickening--chaff. For you know it at a glance. It is your buckskin.

Along about the middle of that century an old prospector with four burros descended the Basin Trail and went into camp just below us. Towards evening he sauntered in.

I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you just as he came down through the fire-lit trees. He was about six feet tall, very leanly built, with a weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was superimposed a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-brows. These had originally been brown, but the sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight twinkled far down beneath the shadows of the brows and a floppy old sombrero hat. The usual flannel shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter completed the outfit. He might have been forty, but was probably nearer sixty years of age.

"Howdy, boys," said he, and dropped to the fireside, where he promptly annexed a coal for his pipe.

We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell to him and Wes. It was commonplace talk enough from one point of view: taken in essence it was merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized man as to another's itinerary--"Did you visit Florence? Berlin? St. Petersburg?"--and then the comparing of impressions. Only here again that old familiar magic of unfamiliar names threw its glamour over the terse sentences.

"Over beyond the Piute Monument," the old prospector explained, "down through the Inyo Range, a leetle north of Death Valley--"

"Back in seventy-eight when I was up in Bay Horse Cañon over by Lost River--"

"Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains?--North of th' Telescope Range?--"

That was all there was to it, with long pauses for drawing at the pipes. Yet somehow in the aggregate that catalogue of names gradually established in the minds of us two who listened an impression of long years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the face of the earth. The old man had wintered here, summered a thousand miles away, made his strike at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully tried for a repetition of his luck at the other. I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though always of course in the background, was ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the mediaeval Christian's idea of heaven. His interest was in the search. For that one could see in him a real enthusiasm. He had his smattering of theory, his very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions, like all prospectors. So long as he could keep in grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life he loved, he was happy.

Perhaps one of the chief elements of this remarkable interest in the game rather than the prizes of it was his desire to vindicate his guesses or his conclusions. He liked to predict to himself the outcome of his solitary operations, and then to prove that prediction through laborious days. His life was a gigantic game of solitaire. In fact, he mentioned a dozen of his claims many years apart which he had developed to a certain point,--"so I could see what they was,"--and then abandoned in favor of fresher discoveries. He cherished the illusion that these were properties to whose completion some day he would return. But we knew better; he had carried them to the point where the result was no longer in doubt and then, like one who has no interest in playing on in an evidently prescribed order, had laid his cards on the table to begin a new game.