He said: “It is my wife, gentlemen—she
is sick—we have been robbed of money, provisions,
everything, by the Indians—we want to rest.”
“Fetch her out! We’ve got to see
her!”
“But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she—”
He “fetched her out,” and they swung their
hats and sent up three rousing cheers and a tiger;
and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched
her dress, and listened to her voice with the look
of men who listened to a memory rather than a present
reality—and then they collected twenty-five
hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and
swung their hats again and gave three more cheers,
and went home satisfied.
Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a
pioneer, and talked with his daughter, a young lady
whose first experience in San Francisco was an adventure,
though she herself did not remember it, as she was
only two or three years old at the time. Her
father said that, after landing from the ship, they
were walking up the street, a servant leading the
party with the little girl in her arms. And presently
a huge miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling
with deadly weapons—just down from a long
campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way,
stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face
all alive with gratification and astonishment.
Then he said, reverently:
“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And
then he snatched a little leather sack out of his
pocket and said to the servant:
“There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in
dust, there, and I’ll give it to you to let
me kiss the child!”
But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table,
listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double
the money for the privilege of kissing the same child,
I would have been refused. Seventeen added years
have far more than doubled the price.
And while upon this subject I will remark that once
in Star City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my
place in a sort of long, post-office single file of
miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through
a crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid
new sensation—a genuine, live Woman!
And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and
I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with
one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-jacks in a frying-pan
with the other.
And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer
mood, now, I voluntarily knock off a hundred from
that.—M.T.] years old, and hadn’t
a tooth in her head.
