But in ’70, on my last visit, the library was gone. Morgan was dead. His cabin door had fallen from its hinges: a young oak tree had sprung up and blocked the entrance. The flooring had been torn up. The window sashes had been taken out. A dinner-pot and broken stove were all that remained of Morgan’s cooking utensils. Some of the roofing had disappeared. It was a ghostly place. The trails leading to and from the Bar were fading out. Here, they were overgrown with brush. There, the river in some higher rise had swept away the lower bank and left nought but a confusion of rough rock over which was no semblance of a track. It was at Hawkins that I had first “buckled to the mines.” My first “buckling,” however, was in the capacity of a meat peddler. I became the agent of a firm of butchers up on the mountain for distributing their tough steaks to the Hawkins’ Bar miners. Through the instrumentality of a horse, over whose back was slung a couple of huge panniers, I continued the agency for a week. Then one morning the horse kicked up his heels and ran away. As he ran, at every kick a raw and bloody steak would fly out of the boxes, flash in the brilliant morning sunshine, and then fall in the fine red dust of the mountain trail. I followed hard after, gathering up these steaks as they fell, and when the burden became too heavy I piled them up by the roadside in little heaps of dusty, very dusty meat. At last, dusty, perspiring and distressed beyond measure, I managed to catch that villainous horse. For he, after having ejected nearly the whole load of meat, concluded to stop and be caught. I loaded the panniers again with the dusty, carnivorous deposits, led the horse down the steep trail to the river, then muddy and of a rich coffee-color from up country mining sediment. Herein I washed my steaks, rinsed them as well as I could of dust, and, as was then the custom, hung up piece after piece in the gauze-curtained meat-safes at the miner’s cabins. I think Hawkins’ got its share of grit that day in its beef. Shortly afterward I went out of the beefsteak-distributing bureau.