Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation.

Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation.

He was standing in the saloon of the Sacramento boat when he felt a sudden heavy pressure on his shoulder, and looking round sharply, beheld not only the black-bearded face of Mr. Dimmidge, lit up by a smile, but beside it the beaming, buxom face of Mrs. Dimmidge, overflowing with good-humor.  Still a little sore from his past experience, he was about to address them abruptly, when he was utterly vanquished by the hearty pressure of their hands and the unmistakable look of gratitude in their eyes.

“I was just saying to ’Lizy Jane,” began Mr. Dimmidge breathlessly, “if I could only meet that young man o’ the ‘Clarion’ what brought us together again”—­

“You’d be willin’ to pay four times the amount we both paid him,” interpolated the laughing Mrs. Dimmidge.

“But I didn’t bring you together,” burst out the dazed young man, “and I’d like to know, in the name of Heaven, what brought you together now?”

“Don’t you see, lad,” said the imperturbable Mr. Dimmidge, “’Lizy Jane and myself had qua’lled, and we just unpacked our fool nonsense in your paper and let the hull world know it!  And we both felt kinder skeert and shamed like, and it looked such small hogwash, and of so little account, for all the talk it made, that we kinder felt lonely as two separated fools that really ought to share their foolishness together.”

“And that ain’t all,” said Mrs. Dimmidge, with a sly glance at her spouse, “for I found out from that ‘Personal’ you showed me that this particular old fool was actooally jealous!—­Jealous!”

“And then?” said the editor impatiently.

“And then I knew he loved me all the time.”

THE SECRET OF SOBRIENTE’S WELL

Even to the eye of the most inexperienced traveler there was no doubt that Buena Vista was a “played-out” mining camp.  There, seamed and scarred by hydraulic engines, was the old hillside, over whose denuded surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful patches; there were the abandoned heaps of tailings already blackened by sun and rain, and worn into mounds like ruins of masonry; there were the waterless ditches, like giant graves, and the pools of slumgullion, now dried into shining, glazed cement.  There were two or three wooden “stores,” from which the windows and doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer settlement of Wynyard’s Gulch.  Four or five buildings that still were inhabited—­the blacksmith’s shop, the post-office, a pioneer’s cabin, and the old hotel and stage-office—­only accented the general desolation.  The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far beyond the others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with adobe walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried pods in the oven-like heat.

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Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.