Scotty may have missed the acquisition of a good mine when he failed to find one lost by Bob Black. While hunting sheep in the Avawatz Range, Bob found some rich float. “Honest,” Bob said, “I knocked off the quartz and had pure gold.” He tried to locate the ledge but he couldn’t match his specimen. Later he returned with Scotty, but a cloudburst had mauled the country. They found the corners of Bob’s tepee, but not the ledge. They made several later attempts to find it, but failed. Bob always declared that some day he would uncover the ledge and might have succeeded if he hadn’t met Ash Meadows Jack Longstreet one day when both were full of desert likker. Bob passed the lie. Jack drew first. Taps for Bob. All kinds of stories have been told to explain Albert Johnson’s connection with Scotty. The first and the true one is that Johnson, coming to the desert for his health, hired Scotty as a guide, liked his yarns and his camping craft and kept him around to yank a laugh out of the grim solitude. But that version didn’t appeal to the old burro men. They could believe in the hydrophobic skunks or the Black Bottle kept in the county hospital to get rid of the old and useless, but not in a Santa Claus like Albert Johnson. “It just don’t make sense—handing that sort of money to a potbellied loafer like Scotty....” Albert Johnson was able to afford any expenditure to make his life in a difficult country less lonely. He could have searched the world over and found no better investment for that purpose than Scotty. Genial, resourceful, and never at a loss for a yarn that would fit his audience, Scotty was cast in a perfect role. As a matter of fact, whatever it cost Johnson for Scotty’s flings in Hollywood, or alimony for Scotty’s wife, it probably came back in the dollar admissions that tourists paid to pass the portals of the Castle for a look at Scotty. Of course they seldom saw Scotty—never in later years. Mrs. Johnson was an intensely religious woman and didn’t like liquor and that disqualified Scotty. “This is Scotty’s room,” the attendant would say. “And that’s his bed.” “Oh, isn’t he here?” “Not today. Scotty’s a little under the weather. Went over to his shack so he wouldn’t be disturbed....” Mrs. Johnson was killed in an auto driven by her husband in Towne’s Pass when, to avoid going over a precipice, he headed the machine into the wall of a cut. In 1939 Albert Johnson testified that he first met Scotty in Johnson’s Chicago office when a wealthy friend appeared with Scotty, who was looking for a grubstake. Johnson said he gave Scotty “something between $1000 and $5000.” When the attorney asked him to be more definite, Johnson replied that at the time, his income was between one-half million and two million dollars a year and the exact amount consequently was of no importance then. “Since then,” Johnson testified, “I have given him $117,000 in cash and about the same in grubstakes, mules, food, and equipment.”