Old Man Granger found the earliest gold in Arizona Gulch. And hot on the news of the strike came Chicken Bill. It was the latter’s boast about the bar-rooms of Timberline that he was second to come into the canyon; and as this was the only word of truth of which Chicken Bill was guilty while he honored the camp with his presence, it deserves a record. Following Old Man Granger’s discovery of his Old Age mine, came not only Chicken Bill, but others; within a week there arose the bubbling camp of Timberline. There were saloons and hurdy-gurdies and stores and restaurants and a bank and a corral and a stage station and an express office and a post-office and an assay office and board sidewalks and red lights and many another plain evidence of civilization. Even a theatre was threatened; and, to add to the gayety as well as the wealth of the baby metropolis, those sundry cattlemen having ranges and habitats within the oak-brushed hills about, began to make Timberline their headquarters and transact their business and their debauches in its throbbing midst. [Illustration: 0411] Chicken Bill was reasonably perfect in all accomplishments of the Southwest. He could work cattle; he could rope, throw, and hog-tie his steer; he could keep up his end at flanking, branding, and ear-marking in a June corral; he could saddle and ride a wild, unbroken bronco; he could make baking-powder biscuit so well flavored and light as to compel the compliments of those jealous epicures of the cow-camps who devoured them. Yet Chicken Bill would not work on the ranges. There were no cards permitted in the camps, and whiskey was debarred as if each bottle held a rattlesnake. Altogether a jovial soul, and one given to revelry, would fly from them in disgust. “It’s too lonesome a play for me, this punchin’ cattle,” observed Chicken Bill, and so eschewed it. While Pike’s Peak Martin expounded this aversion on the part of Chicken Bill, as well as the latter’s refusal to pick and dig and drill and blast in the Timberline mines, as mere laziness, public feeling, though it despised the culprit, was inclined to tolerate him in his shiftlessness. American independence in the Southwest is held to be inclusive of the personal right to refuse all forms of labor. Wherefore Chicken Bill was safe even from criticism as he hung about the saloons and faro rooms and lived his life of chosen vagabondage.