“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.
Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of
our “flush times.” The saloons were
overburdened with custom; so were the police courts,
the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails—unfailing
signs of high prosperity in a mining region—in
any region for that matter. Is it not so?
A crowded police court docket is the surest of all
signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.
Still, there is one other sign; it comes last, but
when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that
the “flush times” are at the flood.
This is the birth of the “literary” paper.
The Weekly Occidental, “devoted to literature,”
made its appearance in Virginia. All the literary
people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F.
was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher
with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in
a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the
Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column
attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single
line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a
solemn and tremendous compliment—viz.:
“The logic of our adversary
resembles the peace of god,”—and
left it to the reader’s memory and after-thought
to invest the remark with another and “more
different” meaning by supplying for himself and
at his own leisure the rest of the Scripture—“in
that it passeth understanding.” He once
said of a little, half-starved, wayside community
that had no subsistence except what they could get
by preying upon chance passengers who stopped over
with them a day when traveling by the overland stage,
that in their Church service they had altered the
Lord’s Prayer to read: “Give us this
day our daily stranger!”
We expected great things of the Occidental.
Of course it could not get along without an original
novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into the
work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F.
was an able romancist of the ineffable school—I
know no other name to apply to a school whose heroes
are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the
opening chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton
who talked nothing but pearls and poetry and who was
virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also
introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement,
in love with the blonde. Mr. F. followed next
week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about getting
