Telling a group of friends about it in the Ballarat cabin later, Shorty of course had to add a few details of his own: “Dan Driscoll came to see me and I told him what the sawbones said. ‘Why hell,’ Dan says. ‘Won’t be nothing left of you. You’ve got to get outa here. When that nurse goes, I’ll take you to a doc who’ll save them feet.’ And the first thing I knew I was in the other hospital. “The doc whetted his meat cleaver, picked up a saw and was about to go to work, when he found there was nothing to dope me with. ‘I’ll fix it,’ Doc says, and wham—he slapped me stiff. I don’t know what he did, but when I came to I was good as new.” After selling a second claim to Haw Tabor, Shorty was again in the money and remembered the girl in Dodge City. Returning, he looked her up, took her to dinner. They danced and dined and Shorty toasted her in “bubble water.” “I reckon everybody in Dodge City thought a caliph had come to town. No little girl suffered for new toggery. No bum lacked a tip. In a week I was broke again. “Going down to the freight yard to steal a ride on the rods I met the girl and the next I knew, I was begging her to marry me. ‘Shorty, you don’t know anything about my past, and still you want to marry me?’ “‘You don’t know anything about my past either,’ I said. But it was no go.” Years afterward when Shorty and I were camped in Hall Canyon, I asked him if he would actually have married a girl like her. “Who am I to count slips?” he bristled. “I did ask her,” and he swabbed a tear that had dried fifty years ago. In 1898, after working for a grubstake he started on the trip that led at last to Death Valley, by way of the San Juan country—one of the world’s roughest regions. “I walked through Arizona, to Northern Mexico—every mile of it desert. A labor strike in Colonel Green’s mines threw me out of a job and I started back. Ran out of water and lived five days on the juice of a bulbous plant—la Flora Morada. Each bulb has a few drops. “On the Mojave I ran out of water again. Finally saw a mangy old camel drinking at a pool. I had enough sense left to know there were no camels around and went on till I flopped. A fellow picked me up. I told him I’d been so goofy I’d seen a camel and water, but I knew it was just a mirage. ‘You damned fool,’ he said. ‘It was a camel and you saw water. Hi Jolly turned that camel loose.’” Shorty reached Tintic, Utah, and from there walked over a waterless desert to the Johnnie mine, where he was given shelter, food, and clothing. Bishop Cannon of the Mormon Church sent him into the Panamint to monument a gold claim. “I was the only fool they could find to cross Death Valley in mid summer. I found the claim but it proved to be patented land.”