In the earlier and soberer part of the afternoon the phrenologist had skilfully steered his way by the safe stars of flattery. Now, as he ran his hands uncertainly through the miner’s thick hair, a look of mystification crept into his bleary eyes. He felt again more carefully.
“Most ’xtraor’nary!” he muttered. “Fren’s,” said he, still feeling at the man’s head, “this person has the most extraor’nary bump of ’quisitiveness. Never felt one like it, ’xcept on th’ cranium of a very celebrated thief an’ robber. His bump of benev’lence ’s a reg’lar hole. Bump of truthfulness don’ somehow seem to be there at all. Bump of cowardice is ’s big ’s an egg. This man, fren’s,” said he, dropping the victim’s head and advancing impressively, “is a very dangerous character. Look out for ’m. He’s a liar, an’ a thief, an’ a coward, an’ a─”
“Well, you old son of a gun!” howled the miner, rising to his feet.
He seized the aged phrenologist, and flung him bodily straight through the sides of a large tent, and immediately dove after him in pursuit. There came from that tent a series of crashes, howls of rage and joy, the sounds of violent scuffling, and then there burst out through the doorway the thoroughly sobered phrenologist, his white beard streaming over one shoulder, his pop eyes bulging out, his bulbous nose quite purple, pursued by the angry miner and a score of the overjoyed populace interrupted in their gambling. Everybody but the two principals was gasping with laughter. It looked as though the miner might do his victim a serious injury, so I caught the pursuer, around the shoulders and held him fast. He struggled violently, but was no match for my bulk, and I restrained him until he had cooled down somewhat, and had ceased trying to bite and kick me. Then all at once he laughed, and I released him. Of the phrenologist nothing remained but a thin cloud of dust hanging in the still air.
Yank and I then thought of going back to camp, and began to look around after Johnny, who had disappeared, when McNally rolled up, inviting us to sup with him.
“You don’t want to go home yet,” he advised us. “Evening’s the time to have fun. Never mind your friend; he’s all right. Now you realize the disadvantage of living way off where you do. My hang-out is just down the street. Let’s have a drink.”
We accepted both his invitations. Then, after the supper, pipes alight, we sauntered down the street, a vast leisure expanding our horizons. At the street corner stood a tall, poetic-looking man, with dreamer’s eyes, a violin clasped under his chin. He was looking straight past us all out into the dusk of the piney mountains beyond, his soul in the music he was producing. They were simple melodies, full of sentiment, and he played as though he loved them. Within the sound of his bow a dead silence reigned. Men stood with eyes cast down, their faces sobered, their eyes adream. One burly, reckless, red-faced individual, who had been bullying it up and down the street, broke into a sob which he violently suppressed, and then looked about fiercely, as though challenging any one to have heard. The player finished, tucked his violin and bow under his arm, and turned away. For a moment the crowd remained motionless, then slowly dispersed. This was John Kelly, a famous wandering minstrel of the camps, a strange, shy, poetic man, who never lacked for dust nor for friends, and who apparently sought for neither.
Under the softening influence of the music the crowd led a better life for about ten minutes.
We entered the gambling rooms, of which there were two, and had a drink of what McNally called “42 calibre whiskey” at the bar of each. In one of them we found Johnny, rather flushed, bucking a faro bank. Yank suggested that he join us, but he shook his head impatiently, and we moved on. In a tremendous tent made by joining three or four ordinary tents together, a very lively fiddle and concertina were in full blast. We entered and were pounced upon by a boisterous group of laughing men, seized by the shoulders, whirled about, and examined from behind.
“Two gentlemen and a lady!” roared out one of them. “Gentlemen on that side; ladies on this. See-lect your pardners for the waltz!”
There was a great rushing to and fro in preparation. Men bowed to each other with burlesque dancing school formality, offered arms, or accepted them with bearlike coyness. We stood for a moment rather bewildered, not knowing precisely what to do.
“You belong over that side,” McNally instructed us. “I go over here; I’m a ‘lady.’”
“Why?” I asked.
“Ladies,” explained McNally, “are those who have patches on the seats of their pants.”
As in most social gatherings, we saw that here too the fair sex were in the majority.
Everybody danced very vigorously, with a tremendous amount of stamping. It seemed a strenuous occupation after a week of hard work, and yet it was great fun. Yank pirouetted and balanced and “sasshayed” and tom-fooled in a manner wonderful to behold. We ended flushed and uproarious; and all trooped to the bar, which, it seemed, was the real reason for the existence of this dance hall.
The crowd was rough and good natured, full of high spirits, and inclined to practical jokes of a pretty stiff character. Of course there was the inevitable bully, swaggering fiercely and truculently back and forth, his belt full of weapons. Nobody took him very seriously; but, on the other hand, everybody seemed to take mighty good care not to run definitely counter to him. In the course of his wanderings he came to our end of the bar, and jostled McNally aside. McNally was at the moment lighting his pipe, so that in his one hand he held a burning match and in the other a glass of whiskey. Without the slightest hurry or excitement, his blue eyes twinkling as humorously as ever, McNally dumped the whiskey over the bully’s shock head with his left hand and touched the match to it with his right. The alcohol sizzled up in a momentary blue flame, without damage save for a very singed head of hair.
“Man on fire! Man on fire!” yelled McNally. “Put him out!”
The miners rose to the occasion joyously, and “put him out” in the most literal fashion; so that no more was seen of that bully.
About ten o’clock we were getting tired; and probably the reaction from the “42 calibre whiskey” was making us drowsy. We hunted up Johnny, still at his faro game; but he positively and impatiently declined to accompany us. He said he was ahead–or behind–I forget which. I notice both conditions have the same effect of keeping a man from quitting. We therefore left him, and wandered home through the soft night, wherein were twinkling stars, gentle breezes, little voices, and the silhouettes of great trees.
*
CHAPTER XX
THE GOLD WASHERS
Johnny did not return at all that night, but showed up next morning at the diggings, looking blear-eyed and sleepy. He told us he had slept with a friend, and replied rather curtly that he was a “little behind the game.” I believe myself that he was cleaned out; but that was none of our business. Every night we divided the dust into five parts. Don Gaspar and Vasquez got two of these. The remainder we again divided into four. I took charge of Talbot’s share. We carried the dust always with us; for the camp was no longer safe from thieves.
In order to effect this division we had to have some sort of scales. I went up to the single store to see what I could do. The storekeeper was a drawling, slow, down-east Yankee, perpetually chewing a long sliver or straw, talking exclusively through his nose, keen for a bargain, grasping of the last cent in a trade, and yet singularly interesting and agreeable. His sense of dry humour had a good deal to do with this. He had no gold scales to lend or to hire, but he had some to sell. The price was fifteen dollars for an ordinary pair of balances worth not over a dollar and a half.
“And you’ll find that cheap, if the miners keep coming in as fast as they do,” said he. “In two weeks they’ll be worth fifty.”
We bought them, and obtained from them great satisfaction. Vasquez used to weigh his gold at night, and again in the morning, in hopes, I suppose, that it had bred overnight.
Certainly the storekeeper’s statement as to the influx of miners was justified. They came every day,
in droves. We began to feel quite like old-timers, and looked with infinite scorn on these greenhorns. They were worse than we had been; for I have seen them trying to work in the moonlight! The diggings were actually getting crowded.
It was no longer feasible to dig wherever we pleased to do so. We held many miners’ meetings, adopting regulations. A claim was to be fifteen feet square; work must begin on it within ten days; and so forth. Each of the five members of our party staked out two claims each, on which we worked in turn. All the old-timers respected these regulations, but some of the newcomers seemed inclined to dispute them; so that many meetings and much wrangling ensued. The truth of the matter was that none of us had the slightest permanent interest in the place. We intended merely to make our piles and to decamp. Each was for himself. Therefore there was no solidarity. We regulated only when we were actually forced to it; so that with what we called “private affairs” we declined to interfere. A man could commit any crime in the decalogue if so it pleased him. His victims must protect themselves. Such things as horse stealing, grand larceny, claim jumping, and mining regulations we dealt with; but other things were not our affair. We were too busy, and too slightly interested in what little public welfare a temporary mining camp might have. Even when, in a few cases, turbulence resulted in shooting, we rarely punished; although, strangely enough, our innate Anglo-Saxon feeling for the formality of government always resulted in a Sunday “inquest.” We deliberated solemnly. The verdict was almost invariably “justifiable self-defence,” which was probably near enough, for most of these killings were the result of quarrels. Murders for the purpose of robbery, later so frequent, were as yet almost unknown. Twice, however, and in both instances the prisoner was one of the gamblers, we pronounced judgment. One of these men was banished, and the other hanged. All in all a very fair semblance of order was kept; but I cannot help now but feel that our early shirking of responsibility–which was typical of all California–made necessary later great upheavals of popular justice.
About this time, also, the first of the overland wagon trains began to come through. Hangman’s Gulch was not on the direct route; but some enterprising individual had found our trail fairly practicable for wagons and ten miles shorter than the regular road. After that many followed, and soon we had a well-cleared road. They showed plainly the hardships of a long journey, for the majority of them were thin, sick looking and discouraged. Few of them stopped at the diggings, although most had come west in hopes of gold, but pushed on down to the pastures of the Sacramento. They were about worn out and needed to recuperate before beginning anything new. Some were out of provisions and practically starved. The Yankee storekeeper sold food at terrible rates. I remember that quinine–a drug much in demand–cost a dollar a grain! We used to look up from our diggings at the procession of these sad-faced, lean men walking by their emaciated cattle, and the women peering from the wagons, and be very thankful that we had decided against the much-touted overland route.
One day, however, an outfit went through of quite a different character. We were apprised of its approach by a hunter named Bagsby. He loped down the trail to the river level very much in a hurry.
“Boys!” he shouted, “quit work! Come see what’s coming down the trail!” with which he charged back again up the hill.
His great excitement impressed us, for Bagsby, like most of the old-time Rocky Mountain men, was not ordinarily what one would call an emotional individual. Therefore we dropped our tools and surged up the hill as fast as we could go. I think we suspected Indians.
A train of three wagons drawn by strong oxen was lurching slowly down the road. It differed little from others of its kind, save that the cattle were in better shape and the men walking alongside, of the tall, competent backwoodsman type, seemed well and hearty. But perhaps a hundred yards ahead of the leading wagon came a horse–the only horse in the outfit–and on it, riding side-saddle, was a girl. She was a very pretty, red-cheeked girl, and she must have stopped within a half mile or so of the camp in order to get herself up for this impressive entrance. Her dress was of blue calico with a white yoke and heavy flounces or panniers; around her neck was a black velvet ribbon; on her head was a big leghorn hat with red roses. She rode through the town, her head high, like a princess; and we all cheered her like mad. Not once did she look at us; but I could see her bosom heaving with excitement beneath her calico, and her nostrils wide. She was a remarkably pretty girl; and this was certainly the moment of her triumph.
We fell into sanity as respects our hours of work and the way we went at it. Often we took as much as an hour and a half off at noon; or quit work early in the day. Then it was pleasant to sit with other miners under the trees or in the shade by the stream swapping yarns, doing our mending or washing, and generally getting acquainted. As each man’s product was his own, no one cared how much or how little the others worked. Simply when he quit, his share ceased. This does not mean that we shirked our work, however; we merely grew to be a little sensible.
Some of our discussions were amusing, and several of them most illuminating. Thus, one day, John Semple summed up a long talk in which the conversation had swung wildly among the ideas of what each would do when he had dug “enough” gold. That had led us to consider what amount we thought would be “enough” for each of us. John settled it.
“Enough,” said he, “is always a little more than a man has.”
The political situation was fruitful of much idle discussion also. California had not been formally placed on any footing whatever by the United States Congress. Whatever any community did in the way of legislation or regulation was extra-legal and subject to ratification. I have heard grave discussions as to whether even murder could be considered a crime, since in this no-man’s land there was no real law forbidding it!
A good many Chinese drifted in about this time, and established a camp of their own a short distance downstream. We took some pride in them as curiosities, with their queer, thatchlike hats, their loose blue clothing, their pigtails wound tight around their heads, and their queer yellow faces. They were an unobtrusive people, scratching away patiently, though spasmodically, on the surface of the ground. We sometimes strolled down to see them. They were very hospitable, and pleased at the interest they excited.
We made from fourteen to seventeen ounces of gold dust a day for some weeks, working our two cradles something like eight hours a day. With gold at the then current rate of fourteen dollars an ounce this was a good return, and we were quite happy. Besides, we were always hoping for a big strike. One day, as I was in the very act of turning my shovelful of dirt into the cradle, my eye caught a dull gleam. I instantly deflected the motion to dump the dirt on the stones alongside, fished about, and dug out a nugget that weighed three and three-quarter ounces. This was by far the largest single nugget found in these diggings–for most of the gold here came in flakes–and it attracted much attention. It belonged to me, individually, because I had not yet dumped it into the cradle.
About this time we had to come to some sort of a decision, for our provisions were about exhausted. We had no desire to replenish our stock from that of the local storekeeper. We were doing pretty well in the diggings, but we had also fairly healthy appetites, and I am convinced that at the prices that man charged we should have no more than kept even. Williams, the storekeeper, was levying double profits, one from us, and one from the overland immigrants. Don Gaspar proposed we send out Vasquez with all the horses to restock at Sutter’s Fort. We were a trifle doubtful as to whether Vasquez would ever come back, but Don Gaspar seemed to have confidence in his man. Finally, though a little doubtfully, we came to the plan. Don Gaspar sent out also to McClellan for safekeeping his accumulations of gold dust; but we did not go quite that far. In view of probable high prices we entrusted him with eighteen ounces for the purchase of goods.
While he was away we came to another decision. It had been for some weeks preparing. The diggings were becoming overcrowded. Almost e
very foot of the bar was occupied, and more men were coming in every day. No longer could the newcomer be sure of his colour the afternoon of his arrival; but was forced to prospect here and there up and down the river until he found a patch of the pay dirt. Most trusted simply to luck, but some had systems on which they worked. I have seen divining rods used. The believers in chance seemed to do as well as any one else.
But, also, our own yield was decreasing. The last week we had gained only nineteen ounces all told. This might be merely a lean bit of misfortune, or it might mean that we had taken the best from our ten claims. Since the human mind is prone to changes, we inclined to the latter theory. We were getting restless. No miner ever came to California who did not believe firmly that he would have done much better had he come out one voyage earlier; and no miner ever found diggings so rich that he had not a sneaking suspicion that he could do even better “a little farther on.”
Our restlessness was further increased by the fact that we were now seeing a good deal of Sam Bagsby, the hunter. He and Yank had found much in common, and forgathered of evenings before our campfire.
Bagsby was a man of over fifty, tall and straight as a youngster, with a short white beard, a gray eye, and hard, tanned flesh. He was a typical Rocky Mountain man, wearing even in the hottest weather his fur cap with the tail hanging behind, his deerskin moccasins, and his fringed buckskin hunting shirt. Mining possessed no interest for him whatever. He was by profession a trapper, and he had crossed the plains a half-dozen times.
Gold Page 15