houses were on the level of the doorsteps of others, and were especially adapted to Billy’s performances.  One afternoon, to the admiring and perplexed eyes of the nursery, he was discovered standing on the apex of a neighbor’s new Elizabethan chimney, on a space scarcely larger than the crown of a hat, calmly surveying the world beneath him.  High infantile voices appealed to him in vain; baby arms were outstretched to him in hopeless invitation; he remained exalted and obdurate, like Milton’s hero, probably by his own merit “raised to that bad eminence.”  Indeed, there was already something Satanic in his budding horns and pointed mask as the smoke curled softly around him.  Then he appropriately vanished, and San Francisco knew him no more.  At the same time, however, one Owen M’Ginnis, a neighboring sandhill squatter, also disappeared, leaving San Francisco for the southern mines, and he was said to have taken Billy with him,—­for no conceivable reason except for companionship.  Howbeit, it was the turning-point of Billy’s career; such restraint as kindness, civilization, or even policemen had exercised upon his nature was gone.  He retained, I fear, a certain wicked intelligence, picked up in San Francisco with the newspapers and theatrical and election posters he had consumed.  He reappeared at Rocky Canyon among the miners as an exceedingly agile chamois, with the low cunning of a satyr.  That was all that civilization had done for him!

If Mr. M’Ginnis had fondly conceived that he would make Billy “useful,” as well as companionable, he was singularly mistaken.  Horses and mules were scarce in Rocky Canyon, and he attempted to utilize Billy by making him draw a small cart, laden with auriferous earth, from his claim to the river.  Billy, rapidly gaining strength, was quite equal to the task, but alas! not his inborn propensity.  An incautious gesture from the first passing miner Billy chose to construe into the usual challenge.  Lowering his head, from which his budding horns had been already pruned by his master, he instantly went for his challenger, cart and all.  Again the scientific law already pointed out prevailed.  With the shock of the onset the entire contents of the cart arose and poured over the astonished miner, burying him from sight.  In any other but a Californian mining-camp such a propensity in a draught animal would have been condemned, on account of the damage and suffering it entailed, but in Rocky Canyon it proved unprofitable to the owner from the very amusement and interest it excited.  Miners lay in wait for Billy with a “greenhorn,” or new-comer, whom they would put up to challenge the animal by some indiscreet gesture.  In this way hardly a cartload of “pay-gravel” ever arrived safely at its destination, and the unfortunate M’Ginnis was compelled to withdraw Billy as a beast of burden.  It was whispered that so great had his propensity become, under repeated provocation, that M’Ginnis himself was no longer safe.  Going ahead of his cart one day to remove a fallen bough from the trail, Billy construed the act of stooping into a playful challenge from his master,—­with the inevitable result.