“They would go on from Placerville, working the yarn up, until fifty mile away it seemed we had a pig that could smell a pay streak, always pointing, like a pointer dog, when he smelled the gold; that he usually walked back home on the hydraulic stream, and that when it was time for a bank to fall he would make sounds that sounded so much like ‘Look out!’ that you couldn’t hardly tell the difference from a man’s yelling it, except that it had a kind of pig brogue to it, as it were, and so forth. “We didn’t have to advertise Hank one particle; even that gol-darned farmer heard of it, and slouched around on the quiet till he see how things lay. “Well, here’s the way he come near getting even. If there’s anything I ever really did love it is to get my hands on a monitor lever and just feel that old streak of water flying across, smacking, gargling and gurgling in the earth, ripping her out, mud and suds a-flying all over, rocks going, too, and just a little touch bringing the blade in the stream and swinging her around, because, you know, four men couldn’t turn that nozzle by bull strength, where just a little blade that cut into it at each side made it turn like a delicate vine. “Now, I liked that as well as when I used to live back East in a little old town up in New York, and it was my job to water the front street, and when there come a carriage along I always used to be absent-minded somehow, and that carriage would run right into the water, and then them good old aunts of mine used to explain it, how absent-minded I was, and the ladies that got wet wouldn’t listen to it, and the nigger coachman and I had it around the barn fast. Well, I was just the same kind of kid again when the monitor was playing, and the sun was shining, and the clouds was sailing, and the grass was growing, and everything that ought to happen was happening. “Yes, my mind was in an A-1 condition, peace and good-will toward men, and everything else, when all of a sudden Hank gives his three locomotive whistles, and pulls for the shore, followed by twenty grown-up men, falling over bushes, jumping over boulders, galloping and waving their arms in wild excitement, Hank far in the lead. “‘What in thunder?’ I said to myself. ‘That bank ain’t nowise loosening;’ when I happened to look down, and there, on a little bench, clapping his hands, sat that guerrilla-faced, swivel-jointed rancher, and there was coming up to him a black-and-tan dog, no bigger’n three rats. He couldn’t see me, and the boys couldn’t see him. They watched for that bank to fall, and there wasn’t any fall, and they waited, and they began cussing their good old friend Hank, that had never failed them once before.