[Illustration: DEBATABLE GROUND--A WARNING TO TRESPASSERS] A colony of younger sons from the East took pity upon me, and gave me a bunk in their Grub Stake cabin, where I had the satisfaction of watching the son of a president of the Somerset Club light the fire with kerosene while the rest of us remained under the blankets and asked him to be careful. They were a most hospitable, cheerful lot. When it was so cold that the ice was frozen in the tin basin, they would elect to remain in bed all day, and would mark up the prices they intended to ask for their lots and claims one hundred dollars each; and then, considering this a fair day’s wages for a hard day’s work, would go warmly to sleep again. It is interesting, chiefly to mothers and sisters--for the fathers and brothers have an unsympathetic way of saying, “It is the best thing for him”--to discover how quickly such carefully bred youths as one constantly meets in the mining camps and ranches of the West can give up the comforts and habits of years and fit into their surroundings. It is instructive and hopeful to watch a young man who can and has ordered numerous dinners at Bignon’s, composing a dessert of bread and molasses, or to see how neatly a Yale graduate of one year’s standing can sweep the mud from the cabin floor without spreading it. If people at home could watch these young exiles gorge themselves with their letters, a page at a time, and then go over them again word by word, they would write early and often; and if the numerous young women of New York and Boston could know that their photographs were the only bright spots in a log-cabin filled with cartridge-belts, picks, saddles, foot-ball sweaters, patent-medicine bottles, and three-months-old magazines, they would be moved with great content. One cannot always discern the true character of one’s neighbors in the West. “Dress,” as Bob Acres says, “does make a difference.” There were four very rough-looking men of different ages sitting at a table near me in one of the restaurants or “eating-houses” of Creede. They had marked out a map on the soiled table-cloth with the point of an iron fork, and one of them was laying down the law concerning it. There seemed to be a dispute concerning the lines of the claim or the direction in which the vein ran. It was no business of mine, and there was so much of that talk that I should not have been attracted to them, except that I expected from their manner they might at any moment come to blows or begin shooting. I finished before they did, and as I passed the table over which they leaned scowling excitedly, the older man cried, with his finger on the map: “Then Thompson passed the ball back to me--no, not your Thompson; Thompson of ’79 I mean--and I carried it down the field all the way to the twenty-five-yard line. Canfield, who was playing full, tackled me; but I shook him off, and--” [Illustration: A MINING CAMP COURT-HOUSE]