Wages were high at Creede. The miners were getting $3, and I, as an unskilled laborer, working with a gang that was cutting a road down Bachelor Mountain from the New York Chance Mine to Creede, was paid $2.50 a day. Our board and lodging cost us $7 a week, but they were worth it, and, even at that rate, there remained a considerable margin for possible saving. Hamilton knew my plans; he was one of the few whom I had told, in the course of my wandering, of the object of the expedition. We had been spending an evening with a company of kindred Bohemians at the house of a mine superintendent, and were returning together to his quarters in the quiet of two o’clock in the morning through a world white with the first snow of winter and dazzling under a full moon. I had money enough to take me to Phœnix by rail, and it seemed the height of folly to go in any other way, so I began to explain why I wished to walk and why I had already walked most of the way from the Atlantic. Hamilton listened patiently, but without interest, I thought, until abruptly he turned upon me with approval, immeasurably beyond my desert, yet showing so sympathetic an insight into the possible service of such work, that I saw again, as by a flash, the rich human quality that had already endeared the man. “And so you worked with the road gang on Bachelor Mountain to get enough to grub stake you to Phœnix?” he said, and he laughed aloud. Then he swore—deeply, resonantly, and from the heart. Price was sent for on the next day, and, in the afternoon, he turned up in Hamilton’s office, a dark, bearded, keen-eyed Irishman, slender and wiry, and all alert at the prospect of getting back to “God’s country,” which in his phrase meant Arizona. Soon, not merely Hamilton and I, but our friends the barrister and the editor and the grave mine superintendent were involved in preparation for the trip. We accompanied Price to the pawnbroker’s shop, where he identified his belongings, and I redeemed them. Then we all set about selecting additional blankets and a fresh store of food. Our pack animals could not have carried their loads, had we taken all that was pressed upon us for the journey. Price borrowed a shot-gun from the private arsenal that was put at our disposal, and I a six-shooter, and we gladly accepted gifts of tobacco until our pockets were bursting with plenty. Weird as it was, our little caravan was but the typical prospector’s outfit as we moved in single file through the winding street of the mining camp, an object of interest only to the four friends who bade us good-by with many slaps on the back and with affectionate oaths. Price was mounted on his Indian pony and I on Sacramento, a burro of uncommon size, while our effects were packed on the backs of two other burros, Beecher and California by name, with two of California’s foals trotting abreast as a running accompaniment to the show.