Gold

"Would you have done it?" I asked, in a sudden flash of illumination.

"Why, of course," said he, with a faint contempt, as he arose.

"Why did you hit me at first, as you did? You gave me no warning whatever."

"Do you get any warning in a real fight?"

I could not controvert this; and yet uneasily, vaguely, I felt there must be a fallacy somewhere. I had been told and not told, what should, or should not, be done, in an affair that apparently could have no rules, and yet had distinctions as to fair and unfair, some of which were explained and some left as obvious. I felt somewhat confused. But often in my later experience with Talbot Ward I felt just that way, so in retrospect it does not strike me so forcibly as it did at that time.

"But you"re a wonder! a perfect wonder!" Ward was saying.

Then we all became aware of a knocking and a rattling at the door. It must have been going on for some time.

"If you don"t open, I"ll get the police! I promise you, I"ll get the police!" the voice of our landlady was saying.

We looked at each other aghast.

"I suppose we must have been making a little noise," conceded Talbot Ward. Noise! It must have sounded as though the house were coming down.

Our ordinary little boxing matches were nothing to it.

Ward threw his military cape around his shoulders, and sank back into a seat beneath the window. I put on an overcoat. One of the boys let her in.

She was thoroughly angry, and she gave us all notice to go. She had done that same every Sat.u.r.day night for a year; but we had always wheedled her out of it. This time, however, she seemed to mean business. I suppose we _had_ made a good deal of a riot. When the fact became evident, I, of course, shouldered the whole responsibility. Thereupon she turned on me. Unexpectedly Talbot Ward spoke up from the obscurity of his corner. His clear voice was incisive, but so courteous with the cold finality of the high-bred aristocrat, that Mrs. Simpkins was cut short in the middle of a sentence.

"I beg you, calm yourself, madam," said he; "it is not worth heating yourself over: for the annoyance, such as it is, will soon be removed.

Mr. Munroe and myself are shortly departing together for California."

CHAPTER III

THE VOYAGE

If I had any scruples--and I do not remember many--they were overcome within the next day or two. It was agreed that I was to go in Ward"s employ, he to pay my pa.s.sage money and all expenses, I to give him half the gold I might pick up. This seemed to me, at least, an eminently satisfactory and businesslike arrangement. Ward bought the outfits for both of us. It turned out that he was a Mexican war veteran--hence the military cape--and in consequence an old campaigner. His experience and my rural upbringing saved us from most of the ridiculous purchases men made at that time. We had stout clothes and boots, a waterproof apiece, picks and shovel, blankets and long strips of canvas, three axes, knives, one rifle, a double shotgun, and a Colt"s revolver apiece. The latter seemed to me a wonderful weapon, with its six charges in the turning cylinder; but I had no opportunity to try it.

Ward decided instantly for the Panama route.

"It"s the most expensive, but also the quickest," said he; "a sailing ship around the Horn takes forever; and across the plains is ditto.

Every day we wait, some other fellow is landing in the diggings."

Nearly every evening he popped into our boarding house, where, owing to the imminence of my departure, I had been restored to favour. I never did find out where he lived. We took our pa.s.sage at the steamship office; we went to the variety shows and sang _Oh, Susannah!_ with the rest; we strutted a bit, and were only restrained from donning our flannel shirts and Colt"s revolving pistols in the streets of New York by a little remnant, a very little remnant, of common sense. When the time at last came, we boarded our steamship, and hung over the rail, and cheered like crazy things. I personally felt as though a lid had been lifted from my spirit, and that a rolling cloud of enthusiasm was at last allowed to puff out to fill my heaven.

In two days we were both over being seasick, and had a chance to look around us. Our ship was a side-wheel steamer of about a thousand tons, and she carried two hundred and eighty pa.s.sengers, which was about two hundred more than her regular complement. They were as miscellaneous a lot as mortal eye ever fell upon: from the lank Maine Yankee to the tall, sallow, black-haired man from Louisiana. I suppose, too, all grades of the social order must have been represented; but in our youth and high spirits we did not go into details of that sort. Every man, with the exception of a dozen or so, wore a red shirt, a slouch hat, a revolver and a bowie knife; and most of us had started to grow beards.

Unless one scrutinized closely such unimportant details as features, ways of speech or manners, one could not place his man"s former status, whether as lawyer, physician or roustabout. And we were too busy for that. I never saw such a busy place as that splattering old ship slowly wallowing her way south toward the tropical seas. We had fifty-eight thousand things to discuss, beginning with Marshall"s first discovery, skipping through the clouds of rumours of all sorts, down to intimate details of climate, outfit, prospects, plans, and the best methods of getting at the gold. And to all these subjects we brought a dozen points of view, each of which was strange to all the others. We had with us men from every stratum of society, and from every point of the compa.s.s. Each was a product of his own training and mental upbringing, and was incapable, without great effort, of understanding his neighbour"s point of view. Communication and travel were in those days very limited, it must be remembered, and different communities and sections of the country produced strong types. With us discussion became an adventurous exploration into a new country; the man from Maine could not but be interested in finding out what that strange, straight-haired, dark creature from Carolina might think of even the most commonplace subject.

Only our subjects were not commonplace.

So my chief impression of that voyage down was of knots of men talking hurriedly and excitedly, as though there were not a moment to waste; and the hum of voices rising and falling far into the night.

Only two things were capable of breaking in on this tense absorption of the men in each other and in their subject--one was dolphins, and the other the meal gong. When dolphins appeared each rushed promptly to the side of the ship and discharged his revolver at the beasts. I never saw any harm come from these fusillades, but they made a wonderful row. Meal times always caught the majority unaware. They tumbled and jostled down the companionways only to find the wise and forethoughtful had preempted every chair. Whereupon, with most ludicrous expressions of chagrin or of a.s.sumed nonchalance, they trooped back to meet the laughter of the wise, if not forethoughtful, who had realized the uselessness of the rush.

After a moment"s grumbling, however, the discussions were resumed.

There was some quarrelling, but not much. A holiday spirit pervaded the lot; for they were men cut off from all experience, all accustomed surroundings, all the restraints of training, and they were embarked on the great adventure. I do not now remember many of them individually.

They were of a piece with the thousands we were destined to encounter.

But I do retain a most vivid mental picture of them collectively, with their red shirts, their slouch hats, their belts full of weapons, their eyes of eagerness, their souls of dreams; br.i.m.m.i.n.g with pent energy; theorizing, arguing, disputing; ready at an instant"s notice for any sort of a joke or excitement that would relieve the tension; boisterous, noisy, laughing loudly, smothering by sheer weight of ridicule individual resentments--altogether a wonderful picture of the youth and hope and energy and high spirits of the time.

Never before nor since have I looked upon such a variety of equipment as strewed the decks and cabins of that ship. A great majority of the pa.s.sengers knew nothing whatever about out-of-door life, and less than nothing as to the conditions in California and on the way. Consequently they had bought liberally of all sorts of idiotic patent contraptions.

India rubber played a prominent part. And the deck was c.u.mbered with at least forty sorts of machines for separating gold from the soil: some of them to use water, some muscular labour, and one tremendous affair with wings was supposed to fan away everything but the gold. Differing in everything else, they were alike in one thing: they had all been devised by men who had never seen any but manufactured gold. I may add that I never saw a machine of the kind actually at work in the diggings.

Just now, however, I looked on the owners of these contraptions with envy, and thought ourselves at a disadvantage with only our picks, shovels, and axes.

But we had with us a wonderful book that went far toward cheering up the poorly equipped. Several copies had been brought aboard, so we all had a chance to read it. The work was ent.i.tled "Three Weeks in the Gold Mines," and was written by a veracious individual who signed himself H.

I. Simpson. I now doubt if he had ever left his New York hall bedroom, though at the time we took his statements for plain truth. Simpson could spare only ten days of this three weeks for actual mining. In that period, with no other implement than a pocket knife, he picked out fifty thousand dollars. The rest of the time he preferred to travel about and see the country, picking up only what incidental nuggets he came across while walking. We believed this.

As we drew southward the days became insufferably warm, but the nights were glorious. Talbot and I liked to sleep on the deck; and generally camped down up near the bitts. The old ship rolled frightfully, for she was light in freight in order to accommodate so many pa.s.sengers; and the dark blue sea appeared to swoop up and down beneath the placid tropic moon.

We had many long, quiet talks up there; but in them all I learned nothing, absolutely nothing, of my companion.

"If you had broken my arm that time, I should not have taken you," he remarked suddenly one evening.

"Shouldn"t blame you," said I.

"No! I wouldn"t have wanted that kind of a man," he continued, "for I should doubt my control of him. But you gave up."

This nettled me.

"Would you have had me, or any man, brute enough to go through with it?"

I demanded.

"Well"--he hesitated--"it was agreed that it was to be _fight_, you remember. And after all, if you had broken my arm, it would have been my fault and not yours."

Two young fellows used occasionally to join us in our swooping, plunging perch. They were as unlike as two men could be, and yet already they had become firm friends. One was a slow, lank, ague-stricken individual from somewhere in the wilds of the Great Lakes, his face lined and brown as though carved from hardwood, his speed slow, his eyes steady with a veiled sardonic humour. His companion was scarcely more than a boy, and he came, I believe, from Virginia. He was a dark, eager youth, with a mop of black shiny hair that he was always tossing back, bright glowing eyes, a great enthusiasm of manner, and an imagination alert to catch fire. The backwoodsman seemed attracted to the boy by this very quick and unsophisticated bubbling of candid youth; while the boy most evidently worshipped his older companion as a symbol of the mysterious frontier. The Northerner was named Rogers, but was invariably known as Yank. The Southerner had some such name as Fairfax, but was called Johnny, and later in California, for reasons that will appear, Diamond Jack. Yank"s distinguishing feature was a long-barrelled "pea shooter"

rifle. He never moved ten feet without it.

Johnny usually did most of the talking when we were all gathered together. Yank and I did the listening and Talbot the interpellating.

Johnny swarmed all over himself like a pickpocket, and showed us everything he had in the way of history, manners, training, family, pride, navete, expectations and hopes. He prided himself on being a calm, phlegmatic individual, unemotional and not easily excited, and he constantly took this att.i.tude. It was a lovely joke.

"Of course," said he, "it won"t be necessary to stay out more than a year. They tell me I can easily make eleven hundred dollars a day; but you know I am not easily moved by such reports"--he was at the time moving under a high pressure, at least ten knots an hour--"I shall be satisfied with three hundred a day. Allowing three hundred working days to the year, that gives me about ninety thousand dollars--plenty!"

"You"ll have a few expenses," suggested Talbot.

"Oh--yes--well, make it a year and a half, just to be on the safe side."

Johnny was eagerly anxious to know everybody on the ship, with the exception of about a dozen from his own South. As far as I could see they did not in the slightest degree differ except in dress from any of the other thirty or forty from that section, but Johnny distinguished.

He stiffened as though Yank"s gunbarrel had taken the place of his spine whenever one of these men was near; and he was so coldly and pointedly courteous that I would have slapped his confounded face if he had acted so to me.

"Look here, Johnny," I said to him one day, "what"s the matter with those fellows? They look all right to me. What do you know against them?"