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+Project Gutenberg's Roughing It, Part 5., by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Roughing It, Part 5.
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: July 2, 2004 [EBook #8586]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGHING IT, PART 5. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ROUGHING IT
+
+                             by Mark Twain
+
+                                 1880
+
+                                Part 5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+Captain Nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism.  But the old
+gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable
+when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not
+go well.  He would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden
+spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into
+a perfect fury.  He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and
+fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong
+convictions and a fine fancy could contrive.  With fair opportunity he
+could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable
+judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him,
+he was so awkward.  However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and
+put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and
+consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his
+own turn had come.  He could not disturb me, with all his raving and
+ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently,
+night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed.  I was altering
+and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of
+having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with
+the dining-room; also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for
+the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue
+I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and
+sunlight; likewise while I was content to put the coachman in a modest
+livery, I was uncertain about a footman--I needed one, and was even
+resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his
+functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet,
+inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but
+no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any
+rate; I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it
+all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it
+--everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from
+Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut, and thence down
+through the country per caravan.  Meantime I was writing to the friends
+at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and
+intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my
+mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also
+directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land and tender the
+proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of
+which I had long been a member in good standing.  [This Tennessee land
+had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to
+confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less
+violent way.]
+
+When I had been nursing the Captain nine days he was somewhat better,
+but very feeble.  During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and
+gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the
+bed again.  We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced
+pain.  Gardiner had his shoulders and I his legs; in an unfortunate
+moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of
+torture.  I never heard a man swear so in my life.  He raved like a
+maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but I got it.
+He ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would
+kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again.  It was
+simply a passing fury, and meant nothing.  I knew he would forget it in
+an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at
+the moment.  So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to
+Esmeralda.  I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was
+on the war path.  I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my
+nine-mile journey, on foot.
+
+Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile
+jaunt without baggage.
+
+As I "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of
+twelve.  I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright
+moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the
+village massed on and around the Wide West croppings.  My heart gave an
+exulting bound, and I said to myself, "They have made a new strike
+to-night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt."  I started over
+there, but gave it up.  I said the "strick" would keep, and I had climbed
+hill enough for one night.  I went on down through the town, and as I was
+passing a little German bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in
+and help her.  She said her husband had a fit.  I went in, and judged she
+was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one.
+Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a
+success of it.  I ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a
+sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with
+the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour,
+and the poor German woman did the crying.  He grew quiet, now, and the
+doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends.
+
+It was a little after one o'clock.  As I entered the cabin door, tired
+but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higbie, sitting by
+the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers,
+and looking pale, old, and haggard.  I halted, and looked at him.  He
+looked at me, stolidly.  I said:
+
+"Higbie, what--what is it?"
+
+"We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!"
+
+It was enough.  I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed.  A
+minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity; I was a pauper now, and
+very meek.  We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and
+useless self-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and why didn't
+I do that," but neither spoke a word.  Then we dropped into mutual
+explanations, and the mystery was cleared away.  It came out that Higbie
+had depended on me, as I had on him, and as both of us had on the
+foreman.  The folly of it!  It was the first time that ever staid and
+steadfast Higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be
+true to his full share of a responsibility.
+
+But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the
+first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last.
+He, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had
+ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a
+hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a
+broken pane.  Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained
+undisturbed for nine days:
+
+      "Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire.  W.
+      has passed through and given me notice.  I am to join him at
+      Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night.  He says
+      he will find it this time, sure.  CAL."
+
+"W."  meant Whiteman, of course.  That thrice accursed "cement!"
+
+That was the way of it.  An old miner, like Higbie, could no more
+withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this
+"cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was
+famishing.  Higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for
+months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken
+the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered
+cement veins.  They had not been followed this time.  His riding out of
+town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had
+not attracted any attention.  He said they prosecuted their search in the
+fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could
+not find the cement.  Then a ghastly fear came over him that something
+might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold
+the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible),
+and forthwith he started home with all speed.  He would have reached
+Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great
+part of the distance.  And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda
+by one road, I entered it by another.  His was the superior energy,
+however, for he went straight to the Wide West, instead of turning aside
+as I had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late!
+The "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed
+beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing.  He learned some facts
+before he left the ground.  The foreman had not been seen about the
+streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called
+him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said.  At any
+rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were
+taking note of the fact.  At midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge
+would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men
+prepared to do the relocating.  That was the crowd I had seen when I
+fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that I was.
+
+[We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had,
+provided we were quick enough.] As midnight was announced, fourteen men,
+duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and
+proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the
+"Johnson."  But A. D. Allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden
+appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said
+his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the Johnson
+company some."  He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to
+be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected.  They
+put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary
+two hundred feet each.  Such was the history of the night's events, as
+Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home.
+
+Higbie and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning,
+glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or
+two of hardship and disappointment, returned to Esmeralda once more.
+Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson companies had
+consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet,
+or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and
+considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for
+ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it.
+If the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares
+in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been
+worth with only our original six hundred in it.  It was the difference
+between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it.  We
+would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade
+one little day on our property and so secured our ownership!
+
+It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses,
+and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is
+easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history.  I can always have
+it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million
+dollars, once, for ten days.
+
+A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire
+partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in
+California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving,
+he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred
+dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.
+How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin
+planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+What to do next?
+
+It was a momentous question.  I had gone out into the world to shift for
+myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends;
+and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian
+stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not
+live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with).  I had
+gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody
+with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty
+in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not,
+after being so wealthy.  I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day,
+but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from
+further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he
+could have my custom.  I had studied law an entire week, and then given
+it up because it was so prosy and tiresome.  I had engaged briefly in the
+study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows
+so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in
+disgrace, and told me I would come to no good.  I had been a bookseller's
+clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read
+with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to
+put a limit to it.  I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but
+my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps
+than soda water.  So I had to go.  I had made of myself a tolerable
+printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day,
+but somehow had missed the connection thus far.  There was no berth open
+in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow
+compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices
+of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the
+habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year."
+
+I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means
+ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty
+dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a
+wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of
+myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my
+European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed
+miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never
+go back home to be pitied--and snubbed."  I had been a private secretary,
+a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than
+nothing in each, and now--
+
+What to do next?
+
+I yielded to Higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more.
+We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little
+rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep.  Higbie
+descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened
+up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled
+shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out.
+You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is
+full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left
+shoulder.  I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the
+shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck.
+I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home.  I inwardly
+resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and
+shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel.
+
+I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to
+speak.  Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters
+to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial
+Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print.
+My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me
+that they might have found something better to fill up with than my
+literature.  I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from
+the hill side, and finally I opened it.  Eureka!  [I never did know what
+Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when
+no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of
+Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of
+the Enterprise.
+
+I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted
+to fall down and worship him, now.  Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked
+like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.
+But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent
+unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long
+array of failures rose up before me.  Yet if I refused this place I must
+presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
+necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
+humiliation since he was thirteen years old.  Not much to be proud of,
+since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of.  So I
+was scared into being a city editor.  I would have declined, otherwise.
+Necessity is the mother of "taking chances."  I do not doubt that if, at
+that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the
+original Hebrew, I would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some
+misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.
+
+I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation.  I was a rusty
+looking city editor, I am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue
+woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to
+the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt.  But I
+secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.
+
+I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do
+so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in
+order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a
+subject of remark.  But the other editors, and all the printers, carried
+revolvers.  I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will
+call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some
+instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town
+and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the
+information gained, and write them out for publication.  And he added:
+
+"Never say 'We learn' so-and-so, or 'It is reported,' or 'It is rumored,'
+or 'We understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute
+facts, and then speak out and say 'It is so-and-so.'  Otherwise, people
+will not put confidence in your news.  Unassailable certainly is the
+thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation."
+
+It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a
+reporter commencing his article with "We understand," I gather a
+suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he
+ought to have done.  I moralize well, but I did not always practise well
+when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too
+often when there was a dearth of news.  I can never forget my first day's
+experience as a reporter.  I wandered about town questioning everybody,
+boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything.  At the end
+of five hours my notebook was still barren.  I spoke to Mr. Goodman.  He
+said:
+
+"Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when
+there were no fires or inquests.  Are there no hay wagons in from the
+Truckee?  If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all
+that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.
+
+"It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business
+like."
+
+I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging
+in from the country.  But I made affluent use of it.  I multiplied it by
+sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made
+sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay
+as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.
+
+This was encouraging.  Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was
+getting along.  Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a
+desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more.  I never
+was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life.  I said to the
+murderer:
+
+"Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day
+which I can never forget.  If whole years of gratitude can be to you any
+slight compensation, they shall be yours.  I was in trouble and you have
+relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear.  Count me
+your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor."
+
+If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching
+desire to do it.  I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to
+details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely,
+that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work
+him up too.
+
+Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and
+found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and
+had fared rather roughly.  I made the best of the item that the
+circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within
+rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could
+add particulars that would make the article much more interesting.
+However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some
+judicious inquiries of the proprietor.  When I learned, through his short
+and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on
+and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the
+other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to
+the killed and wounded.  Having more scope here, I put this wagon through
+an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.
+
+My two columns were filled.  When I read them over in the morning I felt
+that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.  I reasoned within
+myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I
+felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it.
+Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan.  I desired no
+higher commendation.  With encouragement like that, I felt that I could
+take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and
+the interests of the paper demanded it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the
+run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to
+any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging
+noticeably from the domain of fact.
+
+I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we
+swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work.  "Regulars"
+are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups"
+at the quartz mills, and inquests.  Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we
+had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set
+down among the "regulars."  We had lively papers in those days.  My great
+competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union.  He was an
+excellent reporter.  Once in three or four months he would get a little
+intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker
+although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy.  He had the
+advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school
+report and I could not, because the principal hated the Enterprise.
+One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering
+how I was going to get it.  Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted
+street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going.
+
+"After the school report."
+
+"I'll go along with you."
+
+"No, sir.  I'll excuse you."
+
+"Just as you say."
+
+A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and
+Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully.  He gazed fondly after the boy
+and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs.  I said:
+
+"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,
+I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me
+have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to
+suppose they will.  Good night."
+
+"Hold on a minute.  I don't mind getting the report and sitting around
+with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down
+to the principal's with me."
+
+"Now you talk like a rational being.  Come along."
+
+We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and
+returned to our office.  It was a short document and soon copied.
+Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch.  I gave the manuscript back
+to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots
+near by.  We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was
+only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the
+public, and then we separated.  Away at three o'clock in the morning,
+when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual
+--for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on
+the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the
+Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of
+Boggs or the school report.  We stated the case, and all turned out to
+help hunt for the delinquent.  We found him standing on a table in a
+saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the
+other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of
+squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of
+honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey."  [Riotous
+applause.]  He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for
+hours.  We dragged him away and put him to bed.
+
+Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me
+accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass
+its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the
+misfortune had occurred.
+
+But we were perfectly friendly.  The day that the school report was next
+due, the proprietor of the "Genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked
+us to go down and write something about the property--a very common
+request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies,
+for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people.  In due time
+we arrived at the "mine"--nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet
+deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and
+being lowered with a windlass.  The workmen had just gone off somewhere
+to dinner.  I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk; so I took an
+unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the
+rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start
+of him, and then swung out over the shaft.  I reached the bottom muddy
+and bruised about the elbows, but safe.  I lit the candle, made an
+examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to Boggs to
+hoist away.  No answer.  Presently a head appeared in the circle of
+daylight away aloft, and a voice came down:
+
+"Are you all set?"
+
+"All set--hoist away."
+
+"Are you comfortable?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Could you wait a little?"
+
+"Oh certainly--no particular hurry."
+
+"Well--good by."
+
+"Why?  Where are you going?"
+
+"After the school report!"
+
+And he did.  I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when
+they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.
+I walked home, too--five miles--up hill.  We had no school report next
+morning; but the Union had.
+
+Six months after my entry into journalism the grand "flush times" of
+Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three
+years.  All difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased,
+and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the
+world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every
+day.  Virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and
+population, that America had ever produced.  The sidewalks swarmed with
+people--to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter
+to stem the human tide.  The streets themselves were just as crowded with
+quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles.  The procession was
+endless.  So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half
+an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street.  Joy sat on
+every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in
+every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in
+every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart.  Money was
+as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a
+melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.  There were military
+companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres,
+"hurdy-gurdy houses," wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows,
+civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey
+mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor,
+a City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and
+Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police
+force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen
+jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a
+church.  The "flush times" were in magnificent flower!  Large fire-proof
+brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden
+suburbs were spreading out in all directions.  Town lots soared up to
+prices that were amazing.
+
+The great "Comstock lode" stretched its opulent length straight through
+the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent
+process of development.  One of these mines alone employed six hundred
+and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, "as
+the 'Gould and Curry' goes, so goes the city."  Laboring men's wages were
+four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three "shifts" or gangs,
+and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night
+and day.
+
+The "city" of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount
+Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and
+in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty
+miles!  It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand,
+and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees
+and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the
+"Comstock," hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same
+streets.  Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a
+blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.
+
+The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it
+like a roof.  Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street
+below the descent was forty or fifty feet.  The fronts of the houses were
+level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were
+propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window
+of a C street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below
+him facing D street.  It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere,
+to ascend from D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when
+you got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a house
+a-fire--so to speak.  The atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the
+great altitude, that one's blood lay near the surface always, and the
+scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances
+were that a grievous erysipelas would ensue.  But to offset this, the
+thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore,
+to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely
+to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain
+to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera
+glass, either.
+
+From Virginia's airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching
+panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright
+or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the
+zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always
+impressive and beautiful.  Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray
+dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented
+hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was
+glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered
+with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe;
+and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their
+long barrier to the filmy horizon--far enough beyond a lake that burned
+in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles
+removed.  Look from your window where you would, there was fascination in
+the picture.  At rare intervals--but very rare--there were clouds in our
+skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this
+mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the
+eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+My salary was increased to forty dollars a week.  But I seldom drew it.
+I had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar
+gold pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome
+abundance of bright half dollars besides?  [Paper money has never come
+into use on the Pacific coast.]  Reporting was lucrative, and every man
+in the town was lavish with his money and his "feet."  The city and all
+the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts.  There were more
+mines than miners.  True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth
+hauling to a mill, but everybody said, "Wait till the shaft gets down
+where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!"  So nobody was
+discouraged.  These were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly
+worthless, but nobody believed it then.  The "Ophir," the "Gould &
+Curry," the "Mexican," and other great mines on the Comstock lead in
+Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every
+day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as
+any on the "main lead" and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a
+foot when he "got down where it came in solid."  Poor fellow, he was
+blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day.  So the
+thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by
+day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness.  How
+they labored, prophesied, exulted!  Surely nothing like it was ever seen
+before since the world began.  Every one of these wild cat mines--not
+mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines--was incorporated and
+had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too.  It was
+bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day.  You
+could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there
+was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it,
+start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove
+that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market
+and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.  To make money,
+and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.
+
+Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered
+his fortune made.  Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!
+One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a
+wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not
+located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock
+worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting
+too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought
+of such a thing.  They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.
+
+New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
+straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
+"feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
+it.  They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
+something.  Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect
+that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide,"
+or that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did--but as a
+general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you
+down).  If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of
+the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very
+marvel in silver discoveries had transpired.  If the mine was a
+"developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we
+praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in
+the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out
+of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock.  We would squander
+half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
+pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
+admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine
+--but never utter a whisper about the rock.  And those people were always
+pleased, always satisfied.  Occasionally we patched up and varnished our
+reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving
+some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones
+rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting
+notoriety thus conferred upon it.
+
+There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.
+We received presents of "feet" every day.  If we needed a hundred dollars
+or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would
+ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot.  I had a trunk about half
+full of "stock."  When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a
+high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock
+--and generally found it.
+
+The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us
+little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were
+content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it.
+My pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their
+claims "noticed."  At least half of it was given me by persons who had no
+thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal
+"thank you;" and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that.
+If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in
+your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a
+few.  That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush
+times."  Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual
+custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends
+without the asking.
+
+Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
+man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
+binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
+afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted.  Mr. Stewart
+(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
+of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office.  It was worth five
+or ten dollars a foot.  I asked him to make the offer good for next day,
+as I was just going to dinner.  He said he would not be in town; so I
+risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock.  Within the week the
+price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,
+but nothing could make that man yield.  I suppose he sold that stock of
+mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket.  [My revenge will
+be found in the accompanying portrait.]  I met three friends one
+afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at
+eight dollars a foot.  One said if I would come up to his office he would
+give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said
+he would do the same.  But I was going after an inquest and could not
+stop.  A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred
+dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also
+to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried
+to force on me.
+
+These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
+confine myself strictly to the truth.  Many a time friends gave us as
+much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars
+a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a
+guest a cigar.  These were "flush times" indeed!  I thought they were
+going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.
+
+To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community,
+I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for
+cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and
+not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city;
+and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market.  It was
+small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the
+finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as
+the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in
+Nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to
+work it.  Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly
+shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the
+ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder!  It has been often done
+in California.  In the middle of one of the principal business streets of
+Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it.  He
+gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of
+clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue
+for damages.  I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of
+another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India"
+stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient
+tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and
+see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely
+resembled one.
+
+One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and
+sell out while the excitement was up.  The process was simple.
+
+The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon
+load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and
+piled the rest by its side, above ground.  Then he showed the property to
+a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure.  Of course the wagon
+load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.
+A most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir."
+It was claimed that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original
+"Ophir," a valuable mine on the "Comstock."  For a few days everybody was
+talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir.  It was said that
+it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.  I went to the
+place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the
+bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish,
+unpromising rock.  One would as soon expect to find silver in a
+grindstone.  We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle,
+and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black,
+bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver.  Nobody had ever
+heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer
+novelty.  The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure
+the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding
+interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing
+that.  And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in
+any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and
+peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.  On one of the lumps of
+"native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and
+then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted
+half-dollars!  The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they
+resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in
+the bottom of the shaft.  It is literally true.  Of course the price of
+the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined.  But for
+this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+The "flush times" held bravely on.  Something over two years before, Mr.
+Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and
+set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of
+Virginia.  They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken
+weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.  They bought it,
+type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.
+The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office,
+bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment
+and it was a small one, too.  The editors and printers slept on the
+floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the
+general dinner table.  But now things were changed.  The paper was a
+great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three
+compositors; the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the
+advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded.  The paper
+was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the
+"Enterprise Building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately
+fireproof brick.  Every day from five all the way up to eleven columns
+of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and
+irregular "supplements."
+
+The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at
+a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars.  Gould &
+Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience
+confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the
+"Comstock."  The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in
+a fine house built and furnished by the company.  He drove a fine pair of
+horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve
+thousand dollars a year.  The superintendent of another of the great
+mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand
+dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to
+have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.
+
+Money was wonderfully plenty.  The trouble was, not how to get it,--but
+how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.  And so it
+was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires
+that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and money
+was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the
+Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals.  Right on the heels of it
+came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram
+was half a day old.  Virginia rose as one man!  A Sanitary Committee was
+hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street
+and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the
+committee were flying hither and thither and working with all their might
+and main, and that if the town would only wait an hour, an office would
+be ready, books opened, and the Commission prepared to receive
+contributions.  His voice was drowned and his information lost in a
+ceaseless roar of cheers, and demands that the money be received now
+--they swore they would not wait.  The chairman pleaded and argued, but,
+deaf to all entreaty, men plowed their way through the throng and rained
+checks of gold coin into the cart and skurried away for more.  Hands
+clutching money, were thrust aloft out of the jam by men who hoped this
+eloquent appeal would cleave a road their strugglings could not open.
+The very Chinamen and Indians caught the excitement and dashed their half
+dollars into the cart without knowing or caring what it was all about.
+Women plunged into the crowd, trimly attired, fought their way to the
+cart with their coin, and emerged again, by and by, with their apparel in
+a state of hopeless dilapidation.  It was the wildest mob Virginia had
+ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it
+abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket.
+
+To use its own phraseology, it came there "flush" and went away "busted."
+
+After that, the Commission got itself into systematic working order, and
+for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous
+stream.  Individuals and all sorts of organizations levied upon
+themselves a regular weekly tax for the sanitary fund, graduated
+according to their means, and there was not another grand universal
+outburst till the famous "Sanitary Flour Sack" came our way.  Its history
+is peculiar and interesting.  A former schoolmate of mine, by the name of
+Reuel Gridley, was living at the little city of Austin, in the Reese
+river country, at this time, and was the Democratic candidate for mayor.
+He and the Republican candidate made an agreement that the defeated man
+should be publicly presented with a fifty-pound sack of flour by the
+successful one, and should carry it home on his shoulder.  Gridley was
+defeated.  The new mayor gave him the sack of flour, and he shouldered it
+and carried it a mile or two, from Lower Austin to his home in Upper
+Austin, attended by a band of music and the whole population.  Arrived
+there, he said he did not need the flour, and asked what the people
+thought he had better do with it.  A voice said:
+
+"Sell it to the highest bidder, for the benefit of the Sanitary fund."
+
+The suggestion was greeted with a round of applause, and Gridley mounted
+a dry-goods box and assumed the role of auctioneer.  The bids went higher
+and higher, as the sympathies of the pioneers awoke and expanded, till at
+last the sack was knocked down to a mill man at two hundred and fifty
+dollars, and his check taken.  He was asked where he would have the flour
+delivered, and he said:
+
+"Nowhere--sell it again."
+
+Now the cheers went up royally, and the multitude were fairly in the
+spirit of the thing.  So Gridley stood there and shouted and perspired
+till the sun went down; and when the crowd dispersed he had sold the sack
+to three hundred different people, and had taken in eight thousand
+dollars in gold.  And still the flour sack was in his possession.
+
+The news came to Virginia, and a telegram went back:
+
+"Fetch along your flour sack!"
+
+Thirty-six hours afterward Gridley arrived, and an afternoon mass meeting
+was held in the Opera House, and the auction began.  But the sack had
+come sooner than it was expected; the people were not thoroughly aroused,
+and the sale dragged.  At nightfall only five thousand dollars had been
+secured, and there was a crestfallen feeling in the community.  However,
+there was no disposition to let the matter rest here and acknowledge
+vanquishment at the hands of the village of Austin.  Till late in the
+night the principal citizens were at work arranging the morrow's
+campaign, and when they went to bed they had no fears for the result.
+At eleven the next morning a procession of open carriages, attended by
+clamorous bands of music and adorned with a moving display of flags,
+filed along C street and was soon in danger of blockade by a huzzaing
+multitude of citizens.  In the first carriage sat Gridley, with the flour
+sack in prominent view, the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt
+lettering; also in the same carriage sat the mayor and the recorder.
+The other carriages contained the Common Council, the editors and
+reporters, and other people of imposing consequence.  The crowd pressed
+to the corner of C and Taylor streets, expecting the sale to begin there,
+but they were disappointed, and also unspeakably surprised; for the
+cavalcade moved on as if Virginia had ceased to be of importance, and
+took its way over the "divide," toward the small town of Gold Hill.
+Telegrams had gone ahead to Gold Hill, Silver City and Dayton, and those
+communities were at fever heat and rife for the conflict.  It was a very
+hot day, and wonderfully dusty.  At the end of a short half hour we
+descended into Gold Hill with drums beating and colors flying, and
+enveloped in imposing clouds of dust.  The whole population--men, women
+and children, Chinamen and Indians, were massed in the main street, all
+the flags in town were at the mast head, and the blare of the bands was
+drowned in cheers.  Gridley stood up and asked who would make the first
+bid for the National Sanitary Flour Sack.  Gen. W. said:
+
+"The Yellow Jacket silver mining company offers a thousand dollars,
+coin!"
+
+A tempest of applause followed.  A telegram carried the news to Virginia,
+and fifteen minutes afterward that city's population was massed in the
+streets devouring the tidings--for it was part of the programme that the
+bulletin boards should do a good work that day.  Every few minutes a new
+dispatch was bulletined from Gold Hill, and still the excitement grew.
+Telegrams began to return to us from Virginia beseeching Gridley to bring
+back the flour sack; but such was not the plan of the campaign.  At the
+end of an hour Gold Hill's small population had paid a figure for the
+flour sack that awoke all the enthusiasm of Virginia when the grand total
+was displayed upon the bulletin boards.  Then the Gridley cavalcade moved
+on, a giant refreshed with new lager beer and plenty of it--for the
+people brought it to the carriages without waiting to measure it--and
+within three hours more the expedition had carried Silver City and Dayton
+by storm and was on its way back covered with glory.  Every move had been
+telegraphed and bulletined, and as the procession entered Virginia and
+filed down C street at half past eight in the evening the town was abroad
+in the thoroughfares, torches were glaring, flags flying, bands playing,
+cheer on cheer cleaving the air, and the city ready to surrender at
+discretion.  The auction began, every bid was greeted with bursts of
+applause, and at the end of two hours and a half a population of fifteen
+thousand souls had paid in coin for a fifty-pound sack of flour a sum
+equal to forty thousand dollars in greenbacks!  It was at a rate in the
+neighborhood of three dollars for each man, woman and child of the
+population.  The grand total would have been twice as large, but the
+streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted to bid could not get
+within a block of the stand, and could not make themselves heard.  These
+grew tired of waiting and many of them went home long before the auction
+was over.  This was the greatest day Virginia ever saw, perhaps.
+
+Gridley sold the sack in Carson city and several California towns; also
+in San Francisco.  Then he took it east and sold it in one or two
+Atlantic cities, I think.  I am not sure of that, but I know that he
+finally carried it to St. Louis, where a monster Sanitary Fair was being
+held, and after selling it there for a large sum and helping on the
+enthusiasm by displaying the portly silver bricks which Nevada's donation
+had produced, he had the flour baked up into small cakes and retailed
+them at high prices.
+
+It was estimated that when the flour sack's mission was ended it had been
+sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
+greenbacks!  This is probably the only instance on record where common
+family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market.
+
+It is due to Mr. Gridley's memory to mention that the expenses of his
+sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and
+returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own
+pocket.  The time he gave to it was not less than three months.
+Mr. Gridley was a soldier in the Mexican war and a pioneer Californian.
+He died at Stockton, California, in December, 1870, greatly regretted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+There were nabobs in those days--in the "flush times," I mean.  Every
+rich strike in the mines created one or two.  I call to mind several of
+these.  They were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and
+the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were
+themselves--possibly more, in some cases.
+
+Two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man and had to take a
+small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash.  They
+gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming.  But
+not long.  Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each
+owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month--say $100,000 a year.
+
+One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered of wore $6,000 worth
+of diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he could not
+spend his money as fast as he made it.
+
+Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $16,000 a
+month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine
+that yielded it, for five dollars a day, when he first came to the
+country.
+
+The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another of these pets of
+fortune--lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single
+night--who was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official
+distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it--but failed to get it,
+his politics not being as sound as his bank account.
+
+Then there was John Smith.  He was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul,
+born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant.
+He drove a team, and owned a small ranch--a ranch that paid him a
+comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little
+it did yield was worth from $250 to $300 in gold per ton in the market.
+Presently Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped
+silver mine in Gold Hill.  He opened the mine and built a little
+unpretending ten-stamp mill.  Eighteen months afterward he retired from
+the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable
+figure.  Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was
+$60,000.  Smith was very rich at any rate.
+
+And then he went to Europe and traveled.  And when he came back he was
+never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in England, and
+the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had
+noticed in the vicinity of Rome.  He was full of wonders of the old
+world, and advised everybody to travel.  He said a man never imagined
+what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.
+
+One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was
+to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run
+of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours.  Next day, toward noon, the
+figures were all in the purser's hands in sealed envelopes.  Smith was
+serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer.  But another
+party won the prize!  Smith said:
+
+"Here, that won't do!  He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did."
+
+The purser said, "Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board.
+We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday."
+
+"Well, sir," said Smith, "that's just where I've got you, for I guessed
+two hundred and nine.  If you'll look at my figgers again you'll find a 2
+and two 0's, which stands for 200, don't it?--and after 'em you'll find a
+9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine.  I reckon I'll take that
+money, if you please."
+
+The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all
+belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears.  Mr. Curry owned
+two thirds of it--and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred
+dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in
+hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.  And he said that Gould
+sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of
+whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending
+stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.  Four years afterward
+the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven
+millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.
+
+In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican who lived in a canyon
+directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water as large as a man's
+wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises.  The Ophir Company
+segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the
+stream of water.  The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the
+entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its
+mill) was $1,500,000.
+
+An individual who owned twenty feet in the Ophir mine before its great
+riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry
+looking brute he was, too.  A year or so afterward, when Ophir stock went
+up to $3,000 a foot, this man, who had not a cent, used to say he was the
+most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever
+seen--because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--yet
+could not scrape up cash enough to buy a saddle, and was obliged to
+borrow one or ride bareback.  He said if fortune were to give him another
+sixty-thousand-dollar horse it would ruin him.
+
+A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary
+of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German
+names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously
+select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city
+directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed
+through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a
+friend in San Francisco.  Once when a private dispatch was sent from
+Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that
+the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be
+secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot,
+and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the
+rest at double that figure.  Within three months he was worth $150,000,
+and had resigned his telegraphic position.
+
+Another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for
+divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in San
+Francisco to furnish him the result of a great Virginia mining lawsuit
+within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in San
+Francisco.  For this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on
+purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator.  So he went,
+disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the
+mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day
+after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and
+unable to travel--and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed
+clicking through the machine from Virginia.  Finally the private dispatch
+announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as
+he heard it he telegraphed his friend in San Francisco:
+
+"Am tired waiting.  Shall sell the team and go home."
+
+It was the signal agreed upon.  The word "waiting" left out, would have
+signified that the suit had gone the other way.
+
+The mock teamster's friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low
+figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result.
+
+For a long time after one of the great Virginia mines had been
+incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the
+hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers.  The stock
+became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he
+had disappeared.  Once it was heard that he was in New York, and one or
+two speculators went east but failed to find him.  Once the news came
+that he was in the Bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried
+east and sailed for Bermuda--but he was not there.  Finally he was heard
+of in Mexico, and a friend of his, a bar-keeper on a salary, scraped
+together a little money and sought him out, bought his "feet" for a
+hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $75,000.
+
+But why go on?  The traditions of Silverland are filled with instances
+like these, and I would never get through enumerating them were I to
+attempt do it.  I only desired to give, the reader an idea of a
+peculiarity of the "flush times" which I could not present so strikingly
+in any other way, and which some mention of was necessary to a realizing
+comprehension of the time and the country.
+
+I was personally acquainted with the majority of the nabobs I have
+referred to, and so, for old acquaintance sake, I have shifted their
+occupations and experiences around in such a way as to keep the Pacific
+public from recognizing these once notorious men.  No longer notorious,
+for the majority of them have drifted back into poverty and obscurity
+again.
+
+In Nevada there used to be current the story of an adventure of two of
+her nabobs, which may or may not have occurred.  I give it for what it is
+worth:
+
+Col. Jim had seen somewhat of the world, and knew more or less of its
+ways; but Col. Jack was from the back settlements of the States, had led
+a life of arduous toil, and had never seen a city.  These two, blessed
+with sudden wealth, projected a visit to New York,--Col. Jack to see the
+sights, and Col. Jim to guard his unsophistication from misfortune.  They
+reached San Francisco in the night, and sailed in the morning.  Arrived
+in New York, Col.  Jack said:
+
+"I've heard tell of carriages all my life, and now I mean to have a ride
+in one; I don't care what it costs.  Come along."
+
+They stepped out on the sidewalk, and Col. Jim called a stylish barouche.
+But Col. Jack said:
+
+"No, sir!  None of your cheap-John turn-outs for me.  I'm here to have a
+good time, and money ain't any object.  I mean to have the nobbiest rig
+that's going.  Now here comes the very trick.  Stop that yaller one with
+the pictures on it--don't you fret--I'll stand all the expenses myself."
+
+So Col. Jim stopped an empty omnibus, and they got in.  Said Col. Jack:
+
+"Ain't it gay, though?  Oh, no, I reckon not!  Cushions, and windows, and
+pictures, till you can't rest.  What would the boys say if they could see
+us cutting a swell like this in New York?  By George, I wish they could
+see us."
+
+Then he put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver:
+
+"Say, Johnny, this suits me!--suits yours truly, you bet, you!  I want
+this shebang all day.  I'm on it, old man!  Let 'em out!  Make 'em go!
+We'll make it all right with you, sonny!"
+
+The driver passed his hand through the strap-hole, and tapped for his
+fare--it was before the gongs came into common use.  Col. Jack took the
+hand, and shook it cordially.  He said:
+
+"You twig me, old pard!  All right between gents.  Smell of that, and see
+how you like it!"
+
+And he put a twenty-dollar gold piece in the driver's hand.  After a
+moment the driver said he could not make change.
+
+"Bother the change!  Ride it out.  Put it in your pocket."
+
+Then to Col.  Jim, with a sounding slap on his thigh:
+
+"Ain't it style, though?  Hanged if I don't hire this thing every day for
+a week."
+
+The omnibus stopped, and a young lady got in.  Col. Jack stared a moment,
+then nudged Col. Jim with his elbow:
+
+"Don't say a word," he whispered.  "Let her ride, if she wants to.
+Gracious, there's room enough."
+
+The young lady got out her porte-monnaie, and handed her fare to Col.
+Jack.
+
+"What's this for?"  said he.
+
+"Give it to the driver, please."
+
+"Take back your money, madam.  We can't allow it.  You're welcome to ride
+here as long as you please, but this shebang's chartered, and we can't
+let you pay a cent."
+
+The girl shrunk into a corner, bewildered.  An old lady with a basket
+climbed in, and proffered her fare.
+
+"Excuse me," said Col. Jack.  "You're perfectly welcome here, madam, but
+we can't allow you to pay.  Set right down there, mum, and don't you be
+the least uneasy.  Make yourself just as free as if you was in your own
+turn-out."
+
+Within two minutes, three gentlemen, two fat women, and a couple of
+children, entered.
+
+"Come right along, friends," said Col.  Jack; "don't mind us.  This is a
+free blow-out."  Then he whispered to Col.  Jim,
+
+"New York ain't no sociable place, I don't reckon--it ain't no name for
+it!"
+
+He resisted every effort to pass fares to the driver, and made everybody
+cordially welcome.  The situation dawned on the people, and they pocketed
+their money, and delivered themselves up to covert enjoyment of the
+episode.  Half a dozen more passengers entered.
+
+"Oh, there's plenty of room," said Col.  Jack.  "Walk right in, and make
+yourselves at home.  A blow-out ain't worth anything as a blow-out,
+unless a body has company."  Then in a whisper to Col.  Jim: "But ain't
+these New Yorkers friendly?  And ain't they cool about it, too?  Icebergs
+ain't anywhere.  I reckon they'd tackle a hearse, if it was going their
+way."
+
+More passengers got in; more yet, and still more.  Both seats were
+filled, and a file of men were standing up, holding on to the cleats
+overhead.  Parties with baskets and bundles were climbing up on the roof.
+Half-suppressed laughter rippled up from all sides.
+
+"Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don't bang anything
+that ever I saw, I'm an Injun!" whispered Col. Jack.
+
+A Chinaman crowded his way in.
+
+"I weaken!" said Col. Jack.  "Hold on, driver!  Keep your seats, ladies,
+and gents.  Just make yourselves free--everything's paid for.  Driver,
+rustle these folks around as long as they're a mind to go--friends of
+ours, you know.  Take them everywheres--and if you want more money, come
+to the St. Nicholas, and we'll make it all right.  Pleasant journey to
+you, ladies and gents--go it just as long as you please--it shan't cost
+you a cent!"
+
+The two comrades got out, and Col. Jack said:
+
+"Jimmy, it's the sociablest place I ever saw.  The Chinaman waltzed in as
+comfortable as anybody.  If we'd staid awhile, I reckon we'd had some
+niggers.  B' George, we'll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some
+of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the
+style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most
+ceremony.  I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our
+"flush times," the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished
+rough--possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society
+honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the
+philosopher I have quoted from would have needed to see two
+representative funerals in Virginia before forming his estimate of the
+people.
+
+There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died.  He was a
+representative citizen.  He had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel,
+it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers.
+He had kept a sumptuous saloon.  He had been the proprietor of a dashing
+helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce.
+He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very
+Warwick in politics.  When he died there was great lamentation throughout
+the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society.
+
+On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a
+wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body,
+cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his
+neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with
+intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by
+the visitation of God."  What could the world do without juries?
+
+Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.  All the vehicles in
+town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and
+fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to
+muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black.  Now
+--let us remark in parenthesis--as all the peoples of the earth had
+representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had
+brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination
+made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and
+copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in
+the mines of California in the "early days."  Slang was the language of
+Nevada.  It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood.
+Such phrases as "You bet!"  "Oh, no, I reckon not!"  "No Irish need
+apply," and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips
+of a speaker unconsciously--and very often when they did not touch the
+subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything.
+
+After Buck Fanshaw's inquest, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood
+was held, for nothing can be done on the Pacific coast without a public
+meeting and an expression of sentiment.  Regretful resolutions were
+passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one
+was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new
+fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted
+with the ways of the mines.  The committeeman, "Scotty" Briggs, made his
+visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell
+about it.  Scotty was a stalwart rough, whose customary suit, when on
+weighty official business, like committee work, was a fire helmet,
+flaming red flannel shirt, patent leather belt with spanner and revolver
+attached, coat hung over arm, and pants stuffed into boot tops.
+He formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student.  It is
+fair to say of Scotty, however, in passing, that he had a warm heart, and
+a strong love for his friends, and never entered into a quarrel when he
+could reasonably keep out of it.  Indeed, it was commonly said that
+whenever one of Scotty's fights was investigated, it always turned out
+that it had originally been no affair of his, but that out of native
+good-heartedness he had dropped in of his own accord to help the man who
+was getting the worst of it.  He and Buck Fanshaw were bosom friends, for
+years, and had often taken adventurous "pot-luck" together.  On one
+occasion, they had thrown off their coats and taken the weaker side in a
+fight among strangers, and after gaining a hard-earned victory, turned
+and found that the men they were helping had deserted early, and not only
+that, but had stolen their coats and made off with them!  But to return
+to Scotty's visit to the minister.  He was on a sorrowful mission, now,
+and his face was the picture of woe.  Being admitted to the presence he
+sat down before the clergyman, placed his fire-hat on an unfinished
+manuscript sermon under the minister's nose, took from it a red silk
+handkerchief, wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of dismal impressiveness,
+explanatory of his business.
+
+He choked, and even shed tears; but with an effort he mastered his voice
+and said in lugubrious tones:
+
+"Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?"
+
+"Am I the--pardon me, I believe I do not understand?"
+
+With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined:
+
+"Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you
+would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you--that is, if I've got the rights
+of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door."
+
+"I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door."
+
+"The which?"
+
+"The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary
+adjoins these premises."
+
+Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said:
+
+"You ruther hold over me, pard.  I reckon I can't call that hand.  Ante
+and pass the buck."
+
+"How? I beg pardon.  What did I understand you to say?"
+
+"Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me.  Or maybe we've both got the
+bulge, somehow.  You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you.  You see, one
+of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good
+send-off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk
+a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome."
+
+"My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered.  Your observations
+are wholly incomprehensible to me.  Cannot you simplify them in some way?
+At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now.  Would it
+not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements
+of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and
+allegory?"
+
+Another pause, and more reflection.  Then, said Scotty:
+
+"I'll have to pass, I judge."
+
+"How?"
+
+"You've raised me out, pard."
+
+"I still fail to catch your meaning."
+
+"Why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me--that's the idea.  I
+can't neither-trump nor follow suit."
+
+The clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed.  Scotty leaned his head
+on his hand and gave himself up to thought.
+
+Presently his face came up, sorrowful but confident.
+
+"I've got it now, so's you can savvy," he said.  "What we want is a
+gospel-sharp.  See?"
+
+"A what?"
+
+"Gospel-sharp.  Parson."
+
+"Oh!  Why did you not say so before?  I am a clergyman--a parson."
+
+"Now you talk!  You see my blind and straddle it like a man.  Put it
+there!"--extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister's small
+hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent
+gratification.
+
+"Now we're all right, pard.  Let's start fresh.  Don't you mind my
+snuffling a little--becuz we're in a power of trouble.  You see, one of
+the boys has gone up the flume--"
+
+"Gone where?"
+
+"Up the flume--throwed up the sponge, you understand."
+
+"Thrown up the sponge?"
+
+"Yes--kicked the bucket--"
+
+"Ah--has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no
+traveler returns."
+
+"Return!  I reckon not.  Why pard, he's dead!"
+
+"Yes, I understand."
+
+"Oh, you do?  Well I thought maybe you might be getting tangled some
+more.  Yes, you see he's dead again--"
+
+"Again?  Why, has he ever been dead before?"
+
+"Dead before?  No!  Do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat?
+But you bet you he's awful dead now, poor old boy, and I wish I'd never
+seen this day.  I don't want no better friend than Buck Fanshaw.
+I knowed him by the back; and when I know a man and like him, I freeze to
+him--you hear me.  Take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier
+man in the mines.  No man ever knowed Buck Fanshaw to go back on a
+friend.  But it's all up, you know, it's all up.  It ain't no use.
+They've scooped him."
+
+"Scooped him?"
+
+"Yes--death has.  Well, well, well, we've got to give him up.  Yes
+indeed.  It's a kind of a hard world, after all, ain't it?  But pard, he
+was a rustler!  You ought to seen him get started once.  He was a bully
+boy with a glass eye!  Just spit in his face and give him room according
+to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in.
+He was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath.  Pard, he was on
+it!  He was on it bigger than an Injun!"
+
+"On it?  On what?"
+
+"On the shoot.  On the shoulder.  On the fight, you understand.
+He didn't give a continental for any body.  Beg your pardon, friend, for
+coming so near saying a cuss-word--but you see I'm on an awful strain, in
+this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so
+mild.  But we've got to give him up.  There ain't any getting around
+that, I don't reckon.  Now if we can get you to help plant him--"
+
+"Preach the funeral discourse?  Assist at the obsequies?"
+
+"Obs'quies is good.  Yes.  That's it--that's our little game.  We are
+going to get the thing up regardless, you know.  He was always nifty
+himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch
+--solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and a
+nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat--how's that for high?
+And we'll take care of you, pard.  We'll fix you all right.  There'll be
+a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just 'scape out and we'll
+'tend to it.  We've got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in
+No. 1's house, and don't you be afraid.  Just go in and toot your horn,
+if you don't sell a clam.  Put Buck through as bully as you can, pard,
+for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest
+men that was ever in the mines.  You can't draw it too strong.  He never
+could stand it to see things going wrong.  He's done more to make this
+town quiet and peaceable than any man in it.  I've seen him lick four
+Greasers in eleven minutes, myself.  If a thing wanted regulating, he
+warn't a man to go browsing around after somebody to do it, but he would
+prance in and regulate it himself.  He warn't a Catholic.  Scasely.  He
+was down on 'em.  His word was, 'No Irish need apply!'  But it didn't
+make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights
+was--and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started
+in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em!  And he cleaned 'em,
+too!  I was there, pard, and I seen it myself."
+
+"That was very well indeed--at least the impulse was--whether the act was
+strictly defensible or not.  Had deceased any religious convictions?
+That is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance
+to a higher power?"
+
+More reflection.
+
+"I reckon you've stumped me again, pard.  Could you say it over once
+more, and say it slow?"
+
+"Well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been
+connected with any organization sequestered from secular concerns and
+devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?"
+
+"All down but nine--set 'em up on the other alley, pard."
+
+"What did I understand you to say?"
+
+"Why, you're most too many for me, you know.  When you get in with your
+left I hunt grass every time.  Every time you draw, you fill; but I don't
+seem to have any luck.  Lets have a new deal."
+
+"How?  Begin again?"
+
+"That's it."
+
+"Very well.  Was he a good man, and--"
+
+"There--I see that; don't put up another chip till I look at my hand.
+A good man, says you?  Pard, it ain't no name for it.  He was the best
+man that ever--pard, you would have doted on that man.  He could lam any
+galoot of his inches in America.  It was him that put down the riot last
+election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man
+that could have done it.  He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a
+trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less
+than three minutes.  He had that riot all broke up and prevented nice
+before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow.  He was always for
+peace, and he would have peace--he could not stand disturbances.  Pard,
+he was a great loss to this town.  It would please the boys if you could
+chip in something like that and do him justice.  Here once when the Micks
+got to throwing stones through the Methodis' Sunday school windows, Buck
+Fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of
+six-shooters and mounted guard over the Sunday school.  Says he, 'No
+Irish need apply!'  And they didn't.  He was the bulliest man in the
+mountains, pard!  He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold
+more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen
+counties.  Put that in, pard--it'll please the boys more than anything
+you could say.  And you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother."
+
+"Never shook his mother?"
+
+"That's it--any of the boys will tell you so."
+
+"Well, but why should he shake her?"
+
+"That's what I say--but some people does."
+
+"Not people of any repute?"
+
+"Well, some that averages pretty so-so."
+
+"In my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own
+mother, ought to--"
+
+"Cheese it, pard; you've banked your ball clean outside the string.
+What I was a drivin' at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother
+--don't you see?  No indeedy.  He give her a house to live in, and town
+lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her
+all the time; and when she was down with the small-pox I'm d---d if he
+didn't set up nights and nuss her himself!  Beg your pardon for saying
+it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly.
+
+"You've treated me like a gentleman, pard, and I ain't the man to hurt
+your feelings intentional.  I think you're white.  I think you're a
+square man, pard.  I like you, and I'll lick any man that don't.  I'll
+lick him till he can't tell himself from a last year's corpse!  Put it
+there!" [Another fraternal hand-shake--and exit.]
+
+The obsequies were all that "the boys" could desire.  Such a marvel of
+funeral pomp had never been seen in Virginia.  The plumed hearse, the
+dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags
+drooping at half mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret
+societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines,
+carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted
+multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs and windows; and for
+years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in
+Virginia was determined by comparison with Buck Fanshaw's funeral.
+
+Scotty Briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place
+at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of
+the prayer for the dead man's soul ascended, he responded, in a low
+voice, but with feelings:
+
+"AMEN.  No Irish need apply."
+
+As the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was
+probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend
+that was gone; for, as Scotty had once said, it was "his word."
+
+Scotty Briggs, in after days, achieved the distinction of becoming the
+only convert to religion that was ever gathered from the Virginia roughs;
+and it transpired that the man who had it in him to espouse the quarrel
+of the weak out of inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof
+to construct a Christian.  The making him one did not warp his generosity
+or diminish his courage; on the contrary it gave intelligent direction to
+the one and a broader field to the other.
+
+If his Sunday-school class progressed faster than the other classes, was
+it matter for wonder?  I think not.  He talked to his pioneer small-fry
+in a language they understood!  It was my large privilege, a month before
+he died, to hear him tell the beautiful story of Joseph and his brethren
+to his class "without looking at the book."  I leave it to the reader to
+fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of
+that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners
+with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he
+was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII.
+
+The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by
+murdered men.  So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will
+always say and believe.  The reason why there was so much slaughtering
+done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates,
+and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man."  That was
+the very expression used.
+
+If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable,
+honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man?  If he had not, he
+gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small
+consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated
+according to the number of his dead.  It was tedious work struggling up
+to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with
+the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at
+once and his acquaintance sought.
+
+In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief
+desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same
+level in society, and it was the highest.  The cheapest and easiest way
+to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at
+large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell
+whisky.  I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher
+rank than any other member of society.  His opinion had weight.  It was
+his privilege to say how the elections should go.  No great movement
+could succeed without the countenance and direction of the
+saloon-keepers.  It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper
+consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.
+
+Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the
+army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.
+
+To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.  Hence the
+reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed
+in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the
+slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being
+held in indifferent repute by his associates.  I knew two youths who
+tried to "kill their men" for no other reason--and got killed themselves
+for their pains.  "There goes the man that killed Bill Adams" was higher
+praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any
+other speech that admiring lips could utter.
+
+The men who murdered Virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants
+were never punished.  Why?  Because Alfred the Great, when he invented
+trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice
+in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the
+condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from
+the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove
+the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human
+wisdom could contrive.  For how could he imagine that we simpletons would
+go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its
+usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his
+candle-clock after we had invented chronometers?  In his day news could
+not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest,
+intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try
+--but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear
+in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly
+excludes honest men and men of brains.
+
+I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia, which we call a
+jury trial.  A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most
+wanton and cold-blooded way.  Of course the papers were full of it, and
+all men capable of reading, read about it.  And of course all men not
+deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it.  A jury-list was made out,
+and Mr. B. L., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned
+precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in America:
+
+"Have you heard of this homicide?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you held conversations upon the subject?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you formed or expressed opinions about it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you read the newspaper accounts of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We do not want you."
+
+A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of
+high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence
+and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing,
+were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside.  Each said the
+public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that
+sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable
+him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the
+facts.  But of course such men could not be trusted with the case.
+Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.
+
+When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men
+was impaneled--a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked
+about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle
+in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the
+streets were cognizant of!  It was a jury composed of two desperadoes,
+two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could
+not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys!  It actually came out
+afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were
+the same thing.
+
+The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty.  What else could one
+expect?
+
+The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium
+upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.  It is a shame that we must
+continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years
+ago.  In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence
+and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh,
+with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he
+is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and
+stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs.
+Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and
+honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants?  Is it right to show
+the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on
+another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and
+equal?  I am a candidate for the legislature.  I desire to tamper with
+the jury law.  I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence
+and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and
+people who do not read newspapers.  But no doubt I shall be defeated
+--every effort I make to save the country "misses fire."
+
+My idea, when I began this chapter, was to say something about
+desperadoism in the "flush times" of Nevada.  To attempt a portrayal of
+that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be
+like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy.  The desperado
+stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his
+homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a
+humble admirer happy for the rest of the day.  The deference that was
+paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who "kept his private
+graveyard," as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded.
+When he moved along the sidewalk in his excessively long-tailed
+frock-coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat
+tipped over left eye, the small-fry roughs made room for his majesty;
+when he entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and
+merchants to overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered
+his way to a bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized
+him, and --apologized.
+
+They got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a
+curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud
+of the established acquaintanceship that permitted such a familiar form
+of speech as:
+
+"How're ye, Billy, old fel?  Glad to see you.  What'll you take--the old
+thing?"
+
+The "old thing" meant his customary drink, of course.
+
+The best known names in the Territory of Nevada were those belonging to
+these long-tailed heroes of the revolver.  Orators, Governors,
+capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but
+it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as
+Sam Brown, Jack Williams, Billy Mulligan, Farmer Pease, Sugarfoot Mike,
+Pock Marked Jake, El Dorado Johnny, Jack McNabb, Joe McGee, Jack Harris,
+Six-fingered Pete, etc., etc.  There was a long list of them.  They were
+brave, reckless men, and traveled with their lives in their hands.  To
+give them their due, they did their killing principally among themselves,
+and seldom molested peaceable citizens, for they considered it small
+credit to add to their trophies so cheap a bauble as the death of a man
+who was "not on the shoot," as they phrased it.  They killed each other
+on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves
+--for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than "with their boots
+on," as they expressed it.
+
+I remember an instance of a desperado's contempt for such small game as a
+private citizen's life.  I was taking a late supper in a restaurant one
+night, with two reporters and a little printer named--Brown, for
+instance--any name will do.  Presently a stranger with a long-tailed coat
+on came in, and not noticing Brown's hat, which was lying in a chair, sat
+down on it.  Little Brown sprang up and became abusive in a moment.  The
+stranger smiled, smoothed out the hat, and offered it to Brown with
+profuse apologies couched in caustic sarcasm, and begged Brown not to
+destroy him.  Brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight
+--abused him, threatened him, impeached his courage, and urged and even
+implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed
+himself under our protection in mock distress.  But presently he assumed
+a serious tone, and said:
+
+"Very well, gentlemen, if we must fight, we must, I suppose.  But don't
+rush into danger and then say I gave you no warning.  I am more than a
+match for all of you when I get started.  I will give you proofs, and
+then if my friend here still insists, I will try to accommodate him."
+
+The table we were sitting at was about five feet long, and unusually
+cumbersome and heavy.  He asked us to put our hands on the dishes and
+hold them in their places a moment--one of them was a large oval dish
+with a portly roast on it.  Then he sat down, tilted up one end of the
+table, set two of the legs on his knees, took the end of the table
+between his teeth, took his hands away, and pulled down with his teeth
+till the table came up to a level position, dishes and all!  He said he
+could lift a keg of nails with his teeth.  He picked up a common glass
+tumbler and bit a semi-circle out of it.  Then he opened his bosom and
+showed us a net-work of knife and bullet scars; showed us more on his
+arms and face, and said he believed he had bullets enough in his body to
+make a pig of lead.  He was armed to the teeth.  He closed with the
+remark that he was Mr. ---- of Cariboo--a celebrated name whereat we shook
+in our shoes.  I would publish the name, but for the suspicion that he
+might come and carve me.  He finally inquired if Brown still thirsted for
+blood.  Brown turned the thing over in his mind a moment, and then--asked
+him to supper.
+
+With the permission of the reader, I will group together, in the next
+chapter, some samples of life in our small mountain village in the old
+days of desperadoism.  I was there at the time.  The reader will observe
+peculiarities in our official society; and he will observe also, an
+instance of how, in new countries, murders breed murders.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX.
+
+An extract or two from the newspapers of the day will furnish a
+photograph that can need no embellishment:
+
+      FATAL SHOOTING AFFRAY.--An affray occurred, last evening, in a
+      billiard saloon on C street, between Deputy Marshal Jack Williams
+      and Wm. Brown, which resulted in the immediate death of the latter.
+      There had been some difficulty between the parties for several
+      months.
+
+      An inquest was immediately held, and the following testimony
+      adduced:
+
+      Officer GEO. BIRDSALL, sworn, says:--I was told Wm. Brown was drunk
+      and was looking for Jack Williams; so soon as I heard that I started
+      for the parties to prevent a collision; went into the billiard
+      saloon; saw Billy Brown running around, saying if anybody had
+      anything against him to show cause; he was talking in a boisterous
+      manner, and officer Perry took him to the other end of the room to
+      talk to him; Brown came back to me; remarked to me that he thought
+      he was as good as anybody, and knew how to take care of himself; he
+      passed by me and went to the bar; don't know whether he drank or
+      not; Williams was at the end of the billiard-table, next to the
+      stairway; Brown, after going to the bar, came back and said he was
+      as good as any man in the world; he had then walked out to the end
+      of the first billiard-table from the bar; I moved closer to them,
+      supposing there would be a fight; as Brown drew his pistol I caught
+      hold of it; he had fired one shot at Williams; don't know the effect
+      of it; caught hold of him with one hand, and took hold of the pistol
+      and turned it up; think he fired once after I caught hold of the
+      pistol; I wrenched the pistol from him; walked to the end of the
+      billiard-table and told a party that I had Brown's pistol, and to
+      stop shooting; I think four shots were fired in all; after walking
+      out, Mr. Foster remarked that Brown was shot dead.
+
+Oh, there was no excitement about it--he merely "remarked" the small
+circumstance!
+
+Four months later the following item appeared in the same paper (the
+Enterprise).  In this item the name of one of the city officers above
+referred to (Deputy Marshal Jack Williams) occurs again:
+
+      ROBBERY AND DESPERATE AFFRAY.--On Tuesday night, a German named
+      Charles Hurtzal, engineer in a mill at Silver City, came to this
+      place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on B street.  The music,
+      dancing and Teutonic maidens awakened memories of Faderland until
+      our German friend was carried away with rapture.  He evidently had
+      money, and was spending if freely.  Late in the evening Jack
+      Williams and Andy Blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup
+      of coffee.  Williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to
+      procure a deck, but not finding any returned.  On the stairway he
+      met the German, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled
+      his pockets of some seventy dollars.  Hurtzal dared give no alarm,
+      as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or
+      exposed them, they would blow his brains out.  So effectually was he
+      frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him.
+      Yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared.
+
+This efficient city officer, Jack Williams, had the common reputation of
+being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado.  It was said that he had
+several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on
+citizens at dead of night in the public streets of Virginia.
+
+Five months after the above item appeared, Williams was assassinated
+while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the
+crack of the door and Williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls.
+It was said, at the time, that Williams had been for some time aware that
+a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was
+generally believed among the people that Williams's friends and enemies
+would make the assassination memorable--and useful, too--by a wholesale
+destruction of each other.
+
+It did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next
+twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol
+shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named Reeder was
+also disposed of permanently.  Some matters in the Enterprise account of
+the killing of Reeder are worth nothing--especially the accommodating
+complaisance of a Virginia justice of the peace.  The italics in the
+following narrative are mine:
+
+      MORE CUTTING AND SHOOTING.--The devil seems to have again broken
+      loose in our town.  Pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our
+      streets as in early times.  When there has been a long season of
+      quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood
+      is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy.  Night before last Jack
+      Williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody
+      work, growing out of the killing of Williams, and on the same street
+      in which he met his death.  It appears that Tom Reeder, a friend of
+      Williams, and George Gumbert were talking, at the meat market of the
+      latter, about the killing of Williams the previous night, when
+      Reeder said it was a most cowardly act to shoot a man in such a way,
+      giving him "no show."  Gumbert said that Williams had "as good a
+      show as he gave Billy Brown," meaning the man killed by Williams
+      last March.  Reeder said it was a d---d lie, that Williams had no
+      show at all.  At this, Gumbert drew a knife and stabbed Reeder,
+      cutting him in two places in the back.  One stroke of the knife cut
+      into the sleeve of Reeder's coat and passed downward in a slanting
+      direction through his clothing, and entered his body at the small of
+      the back; another blow struck more squarely, and made a much more
+      dangerous wound.  Gumbert gave himself up to the officers of
+      justice, and was shortly after discharged by Justice Atwill, on his
+      own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o'clock in the evening.
+      In the meantime Reeder had been taken into the office of Dr. Owens,
+      where his wounds were properly dressed.  One of his wounds was
+      considered quite dangerous, and it was thought by many that it would
+      prove fatal.  But being considerably under the influence of liquor,
+      Reeder did not feel his wounds as he otherwise would, and he got up
+      and went into the street.  He went to the meat market and renewed
+      his quarrel with Gumbert, threatening his life.  Friends tried to
+      interfere to put a stop to the quarrel and get the parties away from
+      each other.  In the Fashion Saloon Reeder made threats against the
+      life of Gumbert, saying he would kill him, and it is said that he
+      requested the officers not to arrest Gumbert, as he intended to kill
+      him.  After these threats Gumbert went off and procured a
+      double-barreled shot gun, loaded with buck-shot or revolver balls,
+      and went after Reeder.  Two or three persons were assisting him along
+      the street, trying to get him home, and had him just in front of the
+      store of Klopstock & Harris, when Gumbert came across toward him
+      from the opposite side of the street with his gun.  He came up
+      within about ten or fifteen feet of Reeder, and called out to those
+      with him to "look out! get out of the way!" and they had only time
+      to heed the warning, when he fired.  Reeder was at the time
+      attempting to screen himself behind a large cask, which stood
+      against the awning post of Klopstock & Harris's store, but some of
+      the balls took effect in the lower part of his breast, and he reeled
+      around forward and fell in front of the cask.  Gumbert then raised
+      his gun and fired the second barrel, which missed Reeder and entered
+      the ground.  At the time that this occurred, there were a great many
+      persons on the street in the vicinity, and a number of them called
+      out to Gumbert, when they saw him raise his gun, to "hold on," and
+      "don't shoot!"  The cutting took place about ten o'clock and the
+      shooting about twelve.  After the shooting the street was instantly
+      crowded with the inhabitants of that part of the town, some
+      appearing much excited and laughing--declaring that it looked like
+      the "good old times of '60."  Marshal Perry and officer Birdsall
+      were near when the shooting occurred, and Gumbert was immediately
+      arrested and his gun taken from him, when he was marched off to
+      jail.  Many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody
+      work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking
+      themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether
+      the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn
+      in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given
+      us offence.  It was whispered around that it was not all over yet
+      --five or six more were to be killed before night.  Reeder was taken
+      to the Virginia City Hotel, and doctors called in to examine his
+      wounds.  They found that two or three balls had entered his right
+      side; one of them appeared to have passed through the substance of
+      the lungs, while another passed into the liver.  Two balls were also
+      found to have struck one of his legs.  As some of the balls struck
+      the cask, the wounds in Reeder's leg were probably from these,
+      glancing downwards, though they might have been caused by the second
+      shot fired.  After being shot, Reeder said when he got on his feet
+      --smiling as he spoke--"It will take better shooting than that to
+      kill me."  The doctors consider it almost impossible for him to
+      recover, but as he has an excellent constitution he may survive,
+      notwithstanding the number and dangerous character of the wounds he
+      has received.  The town appears to be perfectly quiet at present, as
+      though the late stormy times had cleared our moral atmosphere; but
+      who can tell in what quarter clouds are lowering or plots ripening?
+
+Reeder--or at least what was left of him--survived his wounds two days!
+Nothing was ever done with Gumbert.
+
+Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties.  I do not know what a
+palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no
+doubt at any rate.  Not less than a hundred men have been murdered in
+Nevada--perhaps I would be within bounds if I said three hundred--and as
+far as I can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty
+there.  However, four or five who had no money and no political influence
+have been punished by imprisonment--one languished in prison as much as
+eight months, I think.  However, I do not desire to be extravagant--it
+may have been less.
+
+However, one prophecy was verified, at any rate.  It was asserted by the
+desperadoes that one of their brethren (Joe McGee, a special policeman)
+was known to be the conspirator chosen by lot to assassinate Williams;
+and they also asserted that doom had been pronounced against McGee, and
+that he would be assassinated in exactly the same manner that had been
+adopted for the destruction of Williams--a prophecy which came true a
+year later.  After twelve months of distress (for McGee saw a fancied
+assassin in every man that approached him), he made the last of many
+efforts to get out of the country unwatched.  He went to Carson and sat
+down in a saloon to wait for the stage--it would leave at four in the
+morning.  But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy,
+and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track.  The bar-keeper
+told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the
+door, or the window by the stove.  But a fatal fascination seduced him to
+the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the
+bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to
+remain there.  But he could not.  At three in the morning he again
+returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger.  Before the bar-keeper
+could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired
+through the window and riddled McGee's breast with slugs, killing him
+almost instantly.  By the same discharge the stranger at McGee's side
+also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three
+days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L.
+
+These murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very
+extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of
+history familiar to all old Californians, and worthy to be known by other
+peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice
+unencumbered with nonsense.  I would apologize for this digression but
+for the fact that the information I am about to offer is apology enough
+in itself.  And since I digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well
+to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome.
+
+Capt. Ned Blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious
+one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not
+desire to be famous)--sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for
+many years.  He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had
+been a sailor nearly fifty years--a sailor from early boyhood.  He was a
+rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed
+simplicity, too.  He hated trifling conventionalities--"business" was the
+word, with him.  He had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips
+and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last
+aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.
+
+He sailed for the Chincha Islands in command of a guano ship.  He had a
+fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet--on him he had for years
+lavished his admiration and esteem.  It was Capt. Ned's first voyage to
+the Chinchas, but his fame had gone before him--the fame of being a man
+who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and
+would stand no nonsense.  It was a fame well earned.  Arrived in the
+islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one
+Bill Noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship.  This man had created a
+small reign of terror there.  At nine o'clock at night, Capt. Ned, all
+alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight.  A form ascended the side,
+and approached him.  Capt. Ned said:
+
+"Who goes there?"
+
+"I'm Bill Noakes, the best man in the islands."
+
+"What do you want aboard this ship?"
+
+"I've heard of Capt. Ned Blakely, and one of us is a better man than
+'tother--I'll know which, before I go ashore."
+
+"You've come to the right shop--I'm your man.  I'll learn you to come
+aboard this ship without an invite."
+
+He seized Noakes, backed him against the mainmast, pounded his face to a
+pulp, and then threw him overboard.
+
+Noakes was not convinced.  He returned the next night, got the pulp
+renewed, and went overboard head first, as before.
+
+He was satisfied.
+
+A week after this, while Noakes was carousing with a sailor crowd on
+shore, at noonday, Capt. Ned's colored mate came along, and Noakes tried
+to pick a quarrel with him.  The negro evaded the trap, and tried to get
+away.  Noakes followed him up; the negro began to run; Noakes fired on
+him with a revolver and killed him.  Half a dozen sea-captains witnessed
+the whole affair.  Noakes retreated to the small after-cabin of his ship,
+with two other bullies, and gave out that death would be the portion of
+any man that intruded there.  There was no attempt made to follow the
+villains; there was no disposition to do it, and indeed very little
+thought of such an enterprise.  There were no courts and no officers;
+there was no government; the islands belonged to Peru, and Peru was far
+away; she had no official representative on the ground; and neither had
+any other nation.
+
+However, Capt. Ned was not perplexing his head about such things.  They
+concerned him not.  He was boiling with rage and furious for justice.
+At nine o'clock at night he loaded a double-barreled gun with slugs,
+fished out a pair of handcuffs, got a ship's lantern, summoned his
+quartermaster, and went ashore.  He said:
+
+"Do you see that ship there at the dock?"
+
+"Ay-ay, sir."
+
+"It's the Venus."
+
+"Ay-ay, sir."
+
+"You--you know me."
+
+"Ay-ay, sir."
+
+"Very well, then.  Take the lantern.  Carry it just under your chin.
+I'll walk behind you and rest this gun-barrel on your shoulder, p'inting
+forward--so.  Keep your lantern well up so's I can see things ahead of
+you good.  I'm going to march in on Noakes--and take him--and jug the
+other chaps.  If you flinch--well, you know me."
+
+"Ay-ay, sir."
+
+In this order they filed aboard softly, arrived at Noakes's den, the
+quartermaster pushed the door open, and the lantern revealed the three
+desperadoes sitting on the floor.  Capt.  Ned said:
+
+"I'm Ned Blakely.  I've got you under fire.  Don't you move without
+orders--any of you.  You two kneel down in the corner; faces to the wall
+--now.  Bill Noakes, put these handcuffs on; now come up close.
+Quartermaster, fasten 'em.  All right.  Don't stir, sir.  Quartermaster,
+put the key in the outside of the door.  Now, men, I'm going to lock you
+two in; and if you try to burst through this door--well, you've heard of
+me.  Bill Noakes, fall in ahead, and march.  All set.  Quartermaster,
+lock the door."
+
+Noakes spent the night on board Blakely's ship, a prisoner under strict
+guard.  Early in the morning Capt. Ned called in all the sea-captains in
+the harbor and invited them, with nautical ceremony, to be present on
+board his ship at nine o'clock to witness the hanging of Noakes at the
+yard-arm!
+
+"What!  The man has not been tried."
+
+"Of course he hasn't.  But didn't he kill the nigger?"
+
+"Certainly he did; but you are not thinking of hanging him without a
+trial?"
+
+"Trial!  What do I want to try him for, if he killed the nigger?"
+
+"Oh, Capt.  Ned, this will never do.  Think how it will sound."
+
+"Sound be hanged!  Didn't he kill the nigger?"
+
+"Certainly, certainly, Capt.  Ned,--nobody denies that,--but--"
+
+"Then I'm going to hang him, that's all.  Everybody I've talked to talks
+just the same way you do.  Everybody says he killed the nigger, everybody
+knows he killed the nigger, and yet every lubber of you wants him tried
+for it.  I don't understand such bloody foolishness as that.  Tried!
+Mind you, I don't object to trying him, if it's got to be done to give
+satisfaction; and I'll be there, and chip in and help, too; but put it
+off till afternoon--put it off till afternoon, for I'll have my hands
+middling full till after the burying--"
+
+"Why, what do you mean?  Are you going to hang him any how--and try him
+afterward?"
+
+"Didn't I say I was going to hang him?  I never saw such people as you.
+What's the difference?  You ask a favor, and then you ain't satisfied
+when you get it.  Before or after's all one--you know how the trial will
+go.  He killed the nigger.  Say--I must be going.  If your mate would
+like to come to the hanging, fetch him along.  I like him."
+
+There was a stir in the camp.  The captains came in a body and pleaded
+with Capt. Ned not to do this rash thing.  They promised that they would
+create a court composed of captains of the best character; they would
+empanel a jury; they would conduct everything in a way becoming the
+serious nature of the business in hand, and give the case an impartial
+hearing and the accused a fair trial.  And they said it would be murder,
+and punishable by the American courts if he persisted and hung the
+accused on his ship.  They pleaded hard.  Capt. Ned said:
+
+"Gentlemen, I'm not stubborn and I'm not unreasonable.  I'm always
+willing to do just as near right as I can.  How long will it take?"
+
+"Probably only a little while."
+
+"And can I take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?"
+
+"If he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay."
+
+"If he's proven guilty.  Great Neptune, ain't he guilty?  This beats my
+time.  Why you all know he's guilty."
+
+But at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing
+underhanded.  Then he said:
+
+"Well, all right.  You go on and try him and I'll go down and overhaul
+his conscience and prepare him to go--like enough he needs it, and I
+don't want to send him off without a show for hereafter."
+
+This was another obstacle.  They finally convinced him that it was
+necessary to have the accused in court.  Then they said they would send a
+guard to bring him.
+
+"No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself--he don't get out of my hands.
+Besides, I've got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway."
+
+The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently
+Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a
+Bible and a rope in the other.  He seated himself by the side of his
+captive and told the court to "up anchor and make sail."  Then he turned
+a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes's friends, the two
+bullies.
+
+He strode over and said to them confidentially:
+
+"You're here to interfere, you see.  Now you vote right, do you hear?--or
+else there'll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial's off,
+and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets."
+
+The caution was not without fruit.  The jury was a unit--the verdict.
+"Guilty."
+
+Capt.  Ned sprung to his feet and said:
+
+"Come along--you're my meat now, my lad, anyway.  Gentlemen you've done
+yourselves proud.  I invite you all to come and see that I do it all
+straight.  Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here."
+
+The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the
+hanging, and--
+
+Capt.  Ned's patience was at an end.  His wrath was boundless.  The
+subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.
+
+When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and
+arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man.  He opened his
+Bible, and laid aside his hat.  Selecting a chapter at random, he read it
+through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity.  Then he said:
+
+"Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the
+lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for
+him.  Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear
+inspection.  You killed the nigger?"
+
+No reply.  A long pause.
+
+The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress
+the effect.  Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and
+ended by repeating the question:
+
+"Did you kill the nigger?"
+
+No reply--other than a malignant scowl.  The captain now read the first
+and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling--paused a moment,
+closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of
+satisfaction:
+
+"There.  Four chapters.  There's few that would have took the pains with
+you that I have."
+
+Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and
+timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the
+court.  A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure,
+a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience--a
+misgiving--and he said with a sigh:
+
+"Well, p'raps I ought to burnt him, maybe.  But I was trying to do for
+the best."
+
+When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the "early
+days") it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain's
+popularity in any degree.  It increased it, indeed.  California had a
+population then that "inflicted" justice after a fashion that was
+simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire
+appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Roughing It, Part 5.
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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