Old Joe Riggs was known from the Cache le Poudre to the Rio Grande; to cowman, miner, prospector and goods store folks. Old Joe was a part and parcel of the main range. Forty-niners had bunked with him and fifty-niners had divided buffalo steaks with him, while sixty-niners from Missouri allowed old Joe could rock a cradle or shovel tailings from the sluice boxes, and seventy-niners found him as ready to take his turn at the drill or windlass as the best of them. In appearance old Joe was a weird, uncanny being that made the creeps run up and down one's crupper bone. Seated upon a chair in a room full of average-sized people, Joe appeared a dwarf. His anatomy seemed to rest on the ends of his shoulder blades, while his knees formed the hypothenuse of an inverted right-angle triangle. When standing he overtopped every man in a regiment of six-footers. His arms swung listlessly to his knees from the shoulder socket, as if lacking in elbow joints, terminating in hands fashioned more after the talons of an eagle than those of a human being. His nose was also like the beak of that fierce bird, while his chin retreated from his underlip in a direct line to the "Adam's apple." High cheek bones and protruding forehead caused the deep sunken orbital spaces to appear sightless, except for the nervous batting of his eyelids. His shoulders were broad, but being thin chested, he was short on lung capacity, which caused a most extraordinary mixture of guttural whispers and shrill wheezes every time he tried to talk. His strength was prodigious, and on more than one occasion he had won his drink by taking hold of the chines of a full barrel of liquor, raising it from the ground to his lips and drinking his fill from the bunghole. The most startling of all, though, was his wardrobe, and it was an open secret that Joe had his surname thrust upon him by reason of the various rigs in which he was clad. As the winter season approached and Joe got cold, he would appropriate any and all old garments he could find lying around loose; old pants, overalls, shirts, vests and socks which others had cast away as useless. These he would patch and sew together where necessity demanded, lengthening or widening, and pull one garment on over another. In this semi-annual outfitting he would appear one day with overalls reaching just below the knees, the pair under them revealing their "frazzled" ornamentations for a foot or more. The next day, as like as not, he would find an old pair of red drawers, and these would go on right over the last pair of overalls. When the spring came and warm weather got the best of his clothes, Joe proceeded to divest himself of a lot of useless and uncomfortable rags, for by that time they could not be called garments.