sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress
me.

"A new band?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.

"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five days
before.

"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man
brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in
Schlagel's. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for
No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain
mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it.
He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.

"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' I
tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods
trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.

"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't Buffalo
Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They call 'em Inkers
and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico.
They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says the brown man,
'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into red jars till
they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba
each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a stone house,
with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over
the door.'

"'How do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.