“Go on,” said Islington, with a slight smile.

“Ef I should say to you, Tommy,—­say to you to-day, right here, you must come with me,—­you must leave this place for a month, a year, two years maybe, perhaps forever,—­is there anything that ’ud keep you,—­anything, my boy, ez you couldn’t leave?”

“No,” said Tommy, quietly; “I am only visiting here.  I thought of leaving Greyport to-day.”

“But if I should say to you, Tommy, come with me on a pasear to Chiny, to Japan, to South Ameriky, p’r’aps, could you go?”

“Yes,” said Islington, after a slight pause.

“Thar isn’t ennything,” said Bill, drawing a little closer, and lowering his voice confidentially,—­“ennything in the way of a young woman—­you understand, Tommy—­ez would keep you?  They’re mighty sweet about here; and whether a man is young or old, Tommy, there’s always some woman as is brake or whip to him!”

In a certain excited bitterness that characterized the delivery of this abstract truth, Bill did not see that the young man’s face flushed slightly as he answered “No.”

“Then listen.  It’s seven years ago, Tommy, thet I was working one o’ the Pioneer coaches over from Gold Hill.  Ez I stood in front o’ the stage-office, the sheriff o’ the county comes to me, and he sez, ‘Bill,’ sez he, ’I’ve got a looney chap, as I’m in charge of, taking ’im down to the ’sylum in Stockton.  He’z quiet and peaceable, but the insides don’t like to ride with him.  Hev you enny objection to give him a lift on the box beside you?’ I sez, ‘No; put him up.’  When I came to go and get up on that box beside him, that man, Tommy,—­that man sittin’ there, quiet and peaceable, was—­Johnson!

“He didn’t know me, my boy,” Yuba Bill continued, rising and putting his hands on Tommy’s shoulders,—­“he didn’t know me.  He didn’t know nothing about you, nor Angel’s, nor the quicksilver lode, nor even his own name.  He said his name was Skaggs, but I knowd it was Johnson.  Thar was times, Tommy, you might have knocked me off that box with a feather; thar was times when if the twenty-seven passengers o’ that stage hed found theirselves swimming in the American River five hundred feet below the road, I never could have explained it satisfactorily to the company,—­never.

“The sheriff said,” Bill continued hastily, as if to preclude any interruption from the young man,—­“the sheriff said he had been brought into Murphy’s Camp three years before, dripping with water, and sufferin’ from perkussion of the brain, and had been cared for generally by the boys ’round.  When I told the sheriff I knowed ’im, I got him to leave him in my care; and I took him to ’Frisco, Tommy, to ’Frisco, and I put him in charge o’ the best doctors there, and paid his board myself.  There was nothin’ he didn’t have ez he wanted.  Don’t look that way, my dear boy, for God’s sake, don’t!”

“O Bill,” said Islington, rising and staggering to the window, “why did you keep this from me?”