Bill had told me that as a penniless youngster Blackie had walked up Odessa Canyon one afternoon. Within three days he was rated as a millionaire. Within three months he was broke again. Later Blackie told me, “That’s somebody’s dream. I got about $200,000 and decided I belonged up in the Big Banker group. They welcomed me and skinned me out of my money in no time.” It was Blackie who proved to my satisfaction that money has only a minor relation to happiness. His house was part dobe, part white tufa blocks. On his table was a student’s lamp, a pipe, and can of tobacco. A book held open by a hand axe. Other books were shelved along the wall. He had an incongruous walnut cabinet with leaded glass doors. Inside, a well-filled decanter and a dozen whiskey glasses and a pleasant aroma of bourbon came from a keg covered with a gunny sack and set on a stool in the corner. “This country’s hard on the throat,” he explained. Blackie’s kingdom seemed to have extended from the morning star to the setting sun. He had been in the Yukon, in New Zealand, South Africa, and the Argentine. Gold, hemp, sugar, and ships had tossed fortunes at him which were promptly lost or spent. For a man who had found compensation for such luck, there is no defeat. Certainly his philosophy seemed to meet his needs and that is the function of philosophy. It was cool in the late evening and he made a fire, chucked one end of an eight-foot log into the stove and put a chair under the protruding end. Bill asked why he didn’t cut the log. “Listen,” Blackie said, “you’re one of 100 million reasons why this country is misgoverned. Why should I sweat over that log when a fire will do the job?... That book? Just some fellow’s plan for a perfect world. I hope I’ll not be around when they have it. “The town of Calico? It was a live one. When John McBryde and Lowery Silver discovered the white metal there, a lot of us desert rats got in the big money. In the first seven years of the Eighties it was bonanza and in the eighth the town was dead.” But the stories of fortunes made in Mule and Odessa Canyons were of less importance to him than a habit of the town judge. “Chewed tobacco all the time and swallowed the juice, ‘If a fellow’s guts can’t stand it,’ he would say, ‘he ought to quit,’ and he’d clap a fine on anybody who spat in his court. “Never knew Jack Dent, did you? Englishman. Now there was a drinking man. Said his only ambition was to die drunk. One pay day he got so cockeyed he couldn’t stand, so his pals laid him on a pool table and went on with their drinking. Every time they ordered, Jack hollered for his and somebody would take it over and pour it down him. ‘Keep ’em comin’,’ he says. ‘If I doze off, just pry my jaws open and pour it down.’