Price and I were making progress in acquaintance, and every day I had fresh cause for self-congratulation at my extraordinary luck in having fallen in with so good a guide. Of excellent Irish family, Price was not without education and a taste for letters, although he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of an adventurer on the frontier. And now at middle life, having ranged the Southwest as few men have done, and having seen all phases of its life and shared most of them, he was looking forward to further casual living, perfectly content so long as he had a camping outfit and could wander as he pleased over the face of nature. That some day he would “strike it rich” he never doubted—and may his faith come true. Meanwhile he was getting a good deal out of life. Nature in her milder moods was a constant solace and a joy to him. In long marches through golden Indian summer days, he sang and spouted verses of his own, and told me veritable Ulysses’s tales of men and their strange ways. The few books which he had read he had made his own, for his memory was retentive, and he never forgot, apparently, a face or a name, so that his progress through the country was like a walk about his own neighborhood. With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve of the Western frontiersman, he never questioned me about myself; he was far more interested in what knowledge I might have gathered, which he could add to his own. Oddly enough, it was the little reading that I had done in philosophy that seemed to attract him most. Many a night when it was mild enough to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side by side, “overarched by gorgeous night,” gazing into the starry firmament, and I would tell him what I could of theories of the universe from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling all the while the tension of his mind as he reached out eagerly for these guesses at the mystery of things. It happened that I had been reading “Coningsby,” at Creede, and Prince slipped the copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The story held him, but most of all he was spellbound by its literary charm, and he added a quaint reason for his liking in the remark: “You know,” he said to me, “Lord Beaconsfield was always square with the Irish.” His national partisanship was of the stanchest, and he had always given to the Irish fund when he could; but the outcome of the fight in Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much for him, and he would stoutly maintain that never again, so long as the “traitors” who had turned against Parnell were in the ascendant, would he interest himself in furthering Home Rule—threads of vital connection which were a little strange, I thought, between points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s and the deserts of Arizona.