Two days later George informed me that he had the consent of his father and mother to go to Arizona, to be gone one year, after which time he was going to quit the business for all time.  But we have quit the business before, and then I related the conversation I had with Jim Bridger some years previous at the time I first made up my mind to quit the scouting field.

The time being set for the start, I returned to Jacksonville for my other two horses, clothing, bedding and other traps such as belong to an old scout.  All being in readiness, we bade Mr. and Mrs. Jones good-bye and started on our way for Arizona and aimed to reach San Francisco by Christmas.  We had five horses in our outfit, I having three and George two.  We arrived in San Francisco on the twenty-first of December.

The next morning we were walking up Kearney street near the Lick House when we met the reporter for the Chronicle who I had ridden for at the time of the hanging of Captain Jack and associates at Fort Klamath.  The reporter expressed himself as being very glad to meet us, and insisted on our taking a stroll over to the Chronicle office and meet the proprietors of the paper, whose names were DeYoung, their being three brothers of them.

As we had not changed our clothing, having our traveling suits on I insisted on deferring the matter until the next day, but this he would not hear to.  As that would not work I tried another plan by telling him that we had not yet had our breakfast, but he told us that he had not yet been to breakfast, and proposed that the three of us take breakfast together, or rather invited George and I to take breakfast with him, which we did, seeing that there was no chance to evade him.

After breakfast we accompanied him to the chronicle office, which at that time was located on the corner of Kearney and Pine streets, and here we met all three of the DeYoung brothers.  After being introduced to them and spending some two hours with them, Charles DeYoung, the eldest of the three brothers, gave us a cordial invitation to take dinner with him at his own residence, saying that dinner would be ready at six o’clock.  This, I think, was the first time in my life that I had ever heard a six o’clock meal called dinner.  Thanking him for the kind offer I excused myself as I was in my traveling suit, and the very thought of entering the private residence of one of the popular men of the city almost paralized me.  But my excuses were all fruitless.  He would not even consider “No” as answer, and some of them were with us until time for dinner, as he termed it, but what I would have called supper.

With as bold a front as possible we accompanied Mr. DeYoung to his residence, which we found to be a fine mansion on California street.  On arriving at his residence we met there some ten or twelve other guests, both ladies and gentlemen.  Now the reader can have a faint idea of the embarrassing position in which we were both placed at that moment, and I can truthfully say that at the moment I entered that mansion I would have given three months’ wages to have been away from there.  George Jones had on buckskin breeches and I had on a buckskin suit, while the guests were dressed in style.  I tried to offer some apology, but at every attempt it seemed that I only made a bad matter worse.