"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around Johnson's wife,
an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."
"Why didn't he work it himself?"
"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to leave the
country pretty quick."
"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.
Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville out into
the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a few rarely
touched water-holes, always, always with the golden hope. They develop
prospects and grow rich, develop others and grow poor but never
embittered. Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold enough, time
enough, and men enough to come after you. And at Jimville they
understand the language of the hills.
Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the earth, it
prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods that if you go
over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping spring, up Coso way, you
will find what is worth while. I have never heard that the failure of
any particular hunch disproved the principle. Somehow the rawness of the
land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural. There is
not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you
and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in
Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness,
coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference,
blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the
pot,--it wants the German to coin a word for that,--no bread-envy, no
brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the
savor of lawlessness too much upon their tongues, but you have these to
witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it
represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that
it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts,
so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods.
Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.
Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which
includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end of
all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of view
of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations.