“We had miles of claims on the bank. The pay was light, howsomever, and you had to send about twenty acres down the stream to get enough to pay the hands off. We had plenty of water on a two-hundred-foot fall, or it wouldn’t have paid for the trouble. “Howsomever, we sent an almighty lot of farm land down where the ranchers didn’t want it. They objected to our covering their vegetables with four solid foot of tailings, consequently they kicked like anything, but it was just mine job against vegetable job, and after the law courts had been worn out and decided: The rose is red, the sky is blue; We don’t know nothing, no more’n you, and everybody had an injunction out against somebody else, which he couldn’t enforce, why it came back to our old friend, physical trouble, again. The farmers outnumbered us, but we ranked in the first class for physical trouble, so there hadn’t been anything but an exchange of personal remarks. “There was just one rancher, who grew too fast when he was young, and then stopped too quick after he grew up, came at us fierce. He called us all kinds of twisted crooks and straight-out thieves he could think of. He had it in for me particular. Once, as he got to putting it on me, he grew excited, and began to swing an ax around. He came nigh hitting the stream one or two passes, and I told him: “‘You jay bird, you’ll be a-sitting and a-singing on a limb if you monkey with that little squirt of water. You are perfectly safe from me during working-hours, but don’t fool with our piping lay.’ “Not one man in a million knows what a stream of water can do, and he was one of the million that didn’t. So he r’ared up and said he would splash the water over me, and he raised his ax. I had half a mind to turn the lever and squirt him over the neighboring bluff, but I had pity in my soul, so I hollers, ‘Don’t!’ “But them words was too late. He is one of the very few men who will ever tell anybody how he tried cutting a hydraulic stream in two. While he was blasting me he wandered about, sitting on his horse loose; the ax came down. I was looking right plumb at him, but just how, when and in what way he disappeared I will never tell you. “I followed the direction of the stream until I found him. He was curled up on his back, about half the ax handle in his hand. Soon as I came in sight he hollered, ‘_Whoa!_’ I stared at him. I come a little nearer, and he yelled ‘_Whoa!_’ again, and tried to scramble to his feet. I learned afterward that he’d been a mule-skinner for a while and thought his team had turned on him. “I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Now, you horny-headed son of toil,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve learned one thing to-day. Keep on doing that for three thousand, six hundred and seventy-five days in the year and by the end of that time you won’t put your thumb on the buzz-saw.’ “‘You don’t mean to tell me a stream of water done that!’ he gasps out.