Blucher was bewildered—and touched, too—stirred
to the depths. He reflected. Thought again.
Then an idea struck him, and he said:
“Come with me.”
He took the outcast’s arm, walked him down to
Martin’s restaurant, seated him at a marble
table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said:
“Order what you want, friend. Charge it
to me, Mr. Martin.”
“All right, Mr. Blucher,” said Martin.
Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter
and watched the man stow away cargo after cargo of
buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents a plate; cup
after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth
two dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half’s
worth of destruction had been accomplished, and the
stranger’s hunger appeased, Blucher went down
to French Pete’s, bought a veal cutlet plain,
a slice of bread, and three radishes, with his dime,
and set to and feasted like a king!
Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any
that can be culled from the myriad curiosities of
Californian life, perhaps.
By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down
from one of the decayed mining camps of Tuolumne,
California, and I went back with him. We lived
in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were
not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse
of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of
two or three thousand population had occupied this
grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve
or fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood
had once been the heart of the teeming hive, the centre
of the city. When the mines gave out the town
fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets,
dwellings, shops, everything—and left no
sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth
and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed.
The mere handful of miners still remaining, had seen
the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its
pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass
away like a dream. With it their hopes had died,
and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned
themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond
with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward
their early homes. They had accepted banishment,
forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world.
They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and
they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to
the events that stirred the globe’s great populations,
dead to the common interests of men, isolated and
outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It
was the most singular, and almost the most touching
and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine.—One
of my associates in this locality, for two or three
months, was a man who had had a university education;
but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by
inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner,
and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings,
he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin
and Greek sentences—dead and musty tongues,
meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams
were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a
tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent
to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests,
waiting for rest and the end.
