would laugh, at other people and at himself, with his mouth that was wide and generous, his flashing, even, white teeth, his square fighter's chin, his nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve, finished disconcertingly with a humorous tilt to starboard. He would laugh with every inch of his muscular, well-knit body, with his very hair that was uncompromisingly bristly and as uncompromisingly red; and he laughed now as he said to himself that the district was rightly named.
The Hoodoo! The evil, lumpish spirit of man's aspirations, man's hopes and faith!
Once that part of Idaho had been famed for its rich placer claims that had washed every day into the thousands; then a misleading and glittering outcropping of gold-studded quartz, and a mad wave of adventurers, Americans, Canadians, Englishmen, Scots, and Scandinavians, surging in and making the gaunt hillsides ring with the staccato thud of pickaxe and the dull, minatory rumble of powder and dynamite. Finally disappointment, misgivings, an indiscriminate swallowing of both capital and labor in one tremendous avalanche of failure. . . And the merry band of Argonauts, shaking off their dismay as a spaniel shakes off water and cocking their beavers at the face of misfortune, had followed the gold lure into farther fields, the Kootenais this time.
To-day the Hoodoo district was empty of life except for a couple of ancient Chinamen from California, satisfied with washing their daily dole of five dollars of gold in a forgotten claim; a few optimistic Spokane prospectors who dreamt glimmering mirages of mica; and John Truex, called "Old Man" Truex throughout the Inland Empire.
He was a relic of former days, a man who had once
