Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/82

 in the irony of Old Baboon, and, like the Captain, "made a note of it."

Some women visited him one evening: fallen angels—women with the trail of the serpent all over them— women that at that day lived their fierce, swift lives through in a single lustrum, and at the same time did deeds of mercy that put their purer sisters to the blush. They gave him gifts and money, and, above all, words of encouragement and kindness. He received it all in silence; but I saw when they had gone that the coldness of his face had tempered down, like a wintry hill-side under a day of sun. He moodily filled the meerschaum they had brought him, and after driving a volume of smoke through his nose, looked quietly at me and said: "Society is wrong. These women are not bad women. For my part, I begin to find so much that is evil in that which the world calls good, and so much that is good in what the world calls evil, that I refuse to draw a distinction where God has not." Then he fired a double-barreled volley at society through his nose, and throwing out volume after volume of smoke as a sort of redoubt between himself and the world he hated, drifted silently into a tropical, golden land of dreams.

This was the man who now stood before me with gold enough to buy the town.

"There are nine of us," he went on, "all sworn not to tell. Of course, being sworn, they have all taken the first opportunity to tell their friends and send word to their relatives. Therefore, I will tell you."

This is briefly his account of the discovery. When it reached California that gold had been found in the great watershed of the Columbia River, the miners waited for none of the details as to the wealth of the mines, their extent, or the dangers and hardships to be endured. They poured over the northern mount ain-walls of Nevada-California, dreaming the dreams of '49. He fretted to go, and being able to travel, the fallen angels again fluttered around the friendless man, and his outfit was as complete as the camp could afford. Arrived north, the mines were found a failure, and a party of prospectors attempted to reach the Shoshone Falls through the densely timbered mountains from Elk City. He was of the number. They made but little headway; and the party of forty, in a few weeks, was reduced to nine. Then some became worn-out and discouraged, and being reduced to half-rations, attempted to return by what they thought a shorter route. After nine days' struggle through dense undergrowth and fallen timber, they came out on a little prairie. Here they found signs of game, and being entirely out of provisions, they determined to turn out their horses on the grass and replenish with their rifles. Baboon was left to keep camp. Their blankets were spread by a little spring stream that hugged a dénse growth of tamarack at the edge of the prairie. The prairie lay near the centre of an immense, snow-crested, horseshoe opening to the south, of about thirty miles in diameter. A farm on the Ohio could have produced as many "indications" to the California gold-hunter as the site of this camp; but as the day wore on and the hunters delayed return, Baboon, to kill time, took up a pan, stepped to where a fallen tamarack had thrown up the earth, filled it, and carelessly washed it out. Marshall, in the mill-race, could not have been more astonished. Half a handful of gold —rough, .rugged little specimens, about the size of wheatgrains, and of very poor quality, as it afterward proved, being worth but $11 an ounce—lay in the pan; and the great gold belt, which embraced Salmon, Warren's, Boise, Owyhee, and Blackfoot, was found!

I said, "Thank you, Mr. Bablaine."