scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely
never would--a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers
whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally
called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant,
but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old
snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the cañon
past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!
They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and
they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and
drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money
was pretty soon taking notice.

"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a
capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the
workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the
capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes
like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old
scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two
thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.
What do you think of that for nerve?'

"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new
International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he
was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little
curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was
at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected
from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts
with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred. After all,
twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.'