his life before he discovered his mistake. Bill accepted his apology and a drink, but thought that business was opening a little too briskly in Wickenburg to be permanent, washed the blood from his lace, bound a piece of raw beef on one of his eyes, and struck out for a new location at sunrise next morning.
In the course of his wanderings, he was seen at Hooper & Co's store on the Gila, and for a time was at home around Tucson.
Two or three years after his adventure at La Paz, Concatenation Bill came down Bill Williams' fork from Prescott, near Date Creek, and for some weeks was one of the fixtures of the Great Central Mining Company's camp, at the copper mines near Aubray City, twelve miles above the mouth of the fork. Nobody asked him to stop, and nobody seemed to care to invite him to leave; so he partook liberally of the hospitalities of the camp, never missing a meal nor paying a red, until it was whispered round among the miners that he was a heavy stockholder in the company, and it would be well to be on the good side of him. It was in midsummer, and the heat was something terrible. All day long the naked red mountains absorbed the heat of the burning sun, and all night long they gave it back to the inhabitants, as the baker's brick oven absorbs the heat of the burning wood fire, and gives it back to the loaves within it, when the coals and embers have been raked out. Sleep, until far into the morning hours, was an impossibility, indoors or out, and the miners were wont to spread
