“Right you are,” said the Westerner, well pleased.  “I seem to remember you, too.”

“I have it!” said Mitchell.  “Don’t remember your name—­but you’re the very man Judge Harney pointed out to me as the unluckiest prospector in Montana.  Said you could locate a claim bounded on all sides by paying property and gopher through to China without ever striking ore.”

“May I come over there and talk?” said Steve.  “Mighty glad to see some one from my town.  You didn’t live there though, or I should have met you.”

“Certainly,” said Mitchell, making room.  “Glad to have you.  Live there?  Oh, no, I only made a couple of trips.  Some associates of mine were in with Miles Finlen—­you know him, I reckon?—­on the Bird’s-eye proposition, and I took a flyer with them,” he explained.  “I lost out.  Dropped several dollars,” His face lit up with comfortable good-humor.  “It was a good mine, but it got tied up in the courts.  Let me see—­what did Harney call you—­Townsend, Johnson?”

“Thompson,” said Steve, smiling.  “Steve Thompson.”

“So it was—­so it was.  Well, I was getting close.  Glad to meet you, Mr. Thompson.  That is my name.”  He handed over a bit of pasteboard, inscribed;

    MR. J.F.  MITCHELL

“On Vesey Street now, just south of Barclay Street Ferry.  I’ll jot down the number—­you want to come round and look me up.  Sorry I can’t ask you to use my house for headquarters.  Wife’s away to Bar Harbor for the summer, and I’m camping out in a hotel.  Tell you what, though—­you put up at my caravanserai—­the Cornucopia—­good house, treat you well.  I’ll be busy a day or so catching up after my trip up-state, but after that I’ll show you around.  But perhaps you’ve been here before?”

“Not I,” said Steve.  “My first trip.  Haven’t been out of Montana since I was a kid.  I’m sure glad to meet a friend so soon.”

“Lots of Montana people here,” said Mitchell cheerily.  “We’ll look ’em up.  Probably find some of your old friends.  People here from everywhere.  Say—­Judge Harney got into a bad mix-up, didn’t he?  That young Charley Clark is a devil.  I’ve met him up here.”  With this he launched into a discussion of Butte, with inquiries as to various figures of local prominence, from which Steve was fain to escape by turning the talk on his final good luck, the sale of his mine and his rosy prospects.  For Mitchell had “crammed up” on Butte industriously.  Steve lacked his facilities, his sole source of information being certain long-past campfire tales of Neighbor Jones.

“Made it at last, did you?  Glad to hear it.  Can’t keep a good man down, as the whale said to Jonah,” said Mitchell heartily. “’But with all thy getting, get understanding,’” he quoted with unctuous benevolence.  “The city is full of traps for the unwary.  You can’t be too careful, young man.  Don’t be drawn into gambling, or drinking, or fast company, or you’ll be robbed before you know it.  Watch out for pickpockets, and, above all, be chary of making acquaintance with strangers.  They’re sly down here, my boy—­devilish sly.  Have you any friends in town?  If you have, get them to go around with you till you learn the ropes.”