The queerest thing about the mining business, Carington, is the "hunches." The Englishmen told me that down at Joplin a man would rather have a dream that he walks two miles sou'-sou-west, turns around three times on his heels and finds ore under his left heel, than to have a geologist assure him that his house sits on a ledge of Cherokee limestone that ought to be all right for zinc. I have met great numbers of miners who are hunchers. The most interesting is a man named Bernique, an old chap of education and refinement from St. Louis. He has a hunch about the Canaan Tigmores--at least so far in my intercourse with him I have not found anything more tangible than a hunch. I fell in with him just before I reached Canaan, and though he then declared his intention of being absent for some days, he did not go away, sought me out in Canaan next day and has spent a good deal of time with me ever since. He is a splendid old character. Missouri is chuck full of character, for the matter of that. Besides old Bernique, I have made another friend, named Piney. Isn't that a pretty nice name? He is a sort of gipsy lad who roams the woods in company with old Bernique. I have seen him nearly every day since I have been here, because old Bernique and I ride about the Tigmores, and Piney is sure to fall in with us somewhere along the road. I have also met some others. You can have no conception, Carry, of the strength of pull that Missouri can exert over a fellow. You stand up on a hill and look at her, and something, your dead forefathers maybe, comes up to you in waves of influence. "Come back to your own!" says the Something, "I am waiting for you! By me conquer!" The longer I stay in Missouri, the longer I mean to stay. I have accepted the challenge of this great unconquered, waiting land. It is my own country. Sorry to have kept you so long over all this, but I thought that you ought to know. Shall write you the out-look after the Joplin trip. I have a notion that things will be adjusted toward the future after that. Give my love to the fellows. Yours, B. S. P. S. Please express me one of those fold-up, carry-around-with-you bath-tubs. When Carington, in the office down on Nassau Street, had read that, all of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "Had I not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was still afflicted with a sense of something lacking. "Now where the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried Carington fretfully. "Psha! he has not put that in at all!" As a matter of entity and quiddity, it is well-nigh impossible to put into a letter the little quivering lift of spirit that may come to a man just because a girl's hair is lustrous, her eyes winey, her voice delicious, her smile one of gay fellowship. FOOTNOTE: [1] Carington could not. _Chapter Five_