His sole possessions are some blankets, a gun, and Sunday. If he wants to go anywhere, whether it be one mile or fifty miles away, he straps his blankets on his back, whistles to Sunday, shoulders his gun, and goes. Sometimes he sleeps on the ground and sometimes he stops for a night or for three months in the cabin of some lone mountaineer or in an Indian _rancheria_. It is doubtful if Posey himself knows how many Indian wives and half-breed children he has in these Indian villages scattered through the mountains. He will drop in on one of them for a day or a month, divide his possessions with her and her children, provide lavishly for them with gun and fishing-tackle while he is there, and when the desire fills him to be somewhere else he will leave them with as little concern as he feels for the birds and squirrels in the trees. Save in the mirthfulness of which he is an ever-bubbling spring, Posey has become, in looks and gestures, in mode of thought and manner of expression, as much Indian as white. Nevertheless, he prefers, very greatly, the society of his own race, and likes best that of people of superior mental qualities and force of character. In Posey's creed there is but one article, namely, that all men are eternally and immutably equal--just as good as he is. That is, that would be the sole article in his creed if he had any creed and if he were conscious that such is his belief. For it is very certain that Posey never gave thought, in all his life, to the question of human equality. He simply has an unconscious feeling about it which he has breathed into his being from the mountain air around him and absorbed from the earth which has been his bed for many and many a night. It is there, just as the dirt on his neck is there, and Posey is equally unconscious of them both. Formerly, for a good many years, he was a guide in the Yosemite Valley, and once he had in his charge a woman who was a many times millionaire, of social prestige throughout two continents, and known by name all over her own land from the palaces of Newport to the huts in the Sierras. She found fault with many things, and finally insisted that her stirrup was too small. Posey, who had cheerfully endeavored to satisfy all her complaints, examined it carefully and then told her, in gentlest voice and politest manner: "The stirrup 's all right, madam. It's your foot that 's too damn big."