Whatever may have been the real influence of this unfortunate man upon his fellows, it seemed to find expression in a singular unanimity of criticism.  Patterson looked at him with a half dismal, half welcoming smile.  “Well, you are a h—­ll of a fellow, ain’t you?”

Spencer Tucker passed his hand through his hair and lifted it from his forehead, with a gesture at once emotional and theatrical.  “I am a man with a price on me!” he said bitterly.  “Give me up to the sheriff, and you’ll get five thousand dollars.  Help me, and you’ll get nothing.  That’s my d—­d luck, and yours too, I suppose.”

“I reckon you’re right there,” said Patterson gloomily.  “But I thought you got clean away,—­went off in a ship”—­

“Went off in a boat to a ship,” interrupted Tucker savagely; “went off to a ship that had all my things on board—­everything.  The cursed boat capsized in a squall just off the Heads.  The ship, d—­n her, sailed away, the men thinking I was drowned, likely, and that they’d make a good thing off my goods, I reckon.”

“But the girl, Inez, who was with you, didn’t she make a row?”

“Quien sabe?” returned Tucker, with a reckless laugh.  “Well, I hung on like grim death to that boat’s keel until one of those Chinese fishermen, in a ‘dug-out,’ hauled me in opposite Saucelito.  I chartered him and his dug-out to bring me down here.”

“Why here?” asked Patterson, with a certain ostentatious caution that ill concealed his pensive satisfaction.

“You may well ask,” returned Tucker, with an equal ostentation of bitterness, as he slightly waved his companion away.  “But I reckoned I could trust a white man that I’d been kind to, and who wouldn’t go back on me.  No, no, let me go!  Hand me over to the sheriff!”

Patterson had suddenly grasped both the hands of the picturesque scamp before him, with an affection that for an instant almost shamed the man who had ruined him.  But Tucker’s egotism whispered that this affection was only a recognition of his own superiority, and felt flattered.  He was beginning to believe that he was really the injured party.

“What I have and what I have had is yours, Spence,” returned Patterson, with a sad and simple directness that made any further discussion a gratuitous insult.  “I only wanted to know what you reckoned to do here.”

“I want to get over across the Coast Range to Monterey,” said Tucker.  “Once there, one of those coasting schooners will bring me down to Acapulco, where the ship will put in.”

Patterson remained silent for a moment.  “There’s a mustang in the corral you can take—­leastways, I shan’t know that it’s gone—­until to-morrow afternoon.  In an hour from now,” he added, looking from the window, “these clouds will settle down to business.  It will rain; there will be light enough for you to find your way by the regular trail over the mountain, but not enough for