Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/68

 have a good item of news for him, though as far as that goes, there was no shortage of news in Virginia City, as they had a man for breakfast almost every morning. One night as I was making my run, my horse shied out to one side and would not pass a clump of several juniper trees along the road. I finally forced him back into the road and then I discovered why the horse had shied. From each of these small trees was suspended a man with a rope around his neck, and on each of their chests was pinned a notice from the Vigilance Committee. You should have seen the clearing out of Virginia City after that lynching bee. At another time as one of the saloon men in Virginia City came to his door to see me start out on my run, a man stepped out and shot the saloonkeeper through the heart. Instantly the barkeeper shot the murderer, who also fell fatally wounded, but before he cashed in his checks, he shot the barkeeper and also killed him, so inside of sixty seconds there were three dead men. The alkali dust on my run from Virginia City to Friday Station was so bad that I began bleeding from my lungs, so I had to give up the run. I went to Sacramento and took passage on the Cosmopolitan for San Francisco. This boat, the Cosmopolitan, is now at Seattle and is used as the Bluebird is here, for dancing. I tried to land a job at San Francisco, but jobs seemed hard to land. For three days I slept on the wharf and lived on crackers and cheese. Finally I became desperate and decided to enlist on the frigate Saranac, which was in the bay and which had a recruiting office in the city. I passed the recruiting office at least a score of times and every time I stopped to go in I would shy off and think, 'Maybe something will turn up,' and sure enough when I had just about reached the end of my string, I ran across Henry Garth who had come across the plains with me. Henry didn't have much more money than I had, which was none at all, but he had an uncle at Petaluma. He suggested that we go to Petaluma, as he knew his uncle would give us both a job. We