CHAPTER XII.
Each Day Makes its own Paragraphs and Punctuation Marks.
"I am dreaming to-night of the days gone by,
When I camped in the open so free and grand.
* * * * *
Those days have gone; each passing year
Has made the buoyant steps grow slow,
But the pictures stay to comfort and cheer
The days that come and the days that go."
During the preparation of the previous chapters I have once again been twenty-four years old. Once again I have lived over those five months, so alternated with lights and shadows, but above which the star of hope never for a moment lacked luster or definiteness. The entire route from Monroe, Michigan, to Hangtown, was one great book, having new lessons and illustrations for each day. Some of them were beautiful beyond description; others were terrible beyond compare, and so hard to understand.
Each day made its own paragraphs and punctuation marks, and how surprising and unexpected many of them were! Commas would become semicolons and periods give place to exclamation points, in the most reckless sort of fashion. The event which had been planned as a period to a day's doings would often instead become a hyphen, leading into and connecting us with conditions wholly undreamed of.
To-day as I look back upon the more than fifty intervening years I realize that the wealth that I gathered from the wayside of each day's doings has enriched my whole after-life far beyond the nuggets which I digged from the mines. Nature never does anything half-heartedly. Her every lesson, picture, and song is an inspirer and enricher to all who would learn, look, and listen aright.
All of our company, excepting the one who still sleeps in his prairie bed, eventually reached the "promised land." Captain and Mrs. Wadsworth, then as before, were noted and esteemed for their noble manhood and womanhood. The Captain in time was made Marshal of Placerville and did much for the advancement of its interests. Both he and his wife died after being in California about seven years. Charley Stewart, the young man with whom I had the midnight tussle, returned to his home in a few months, dying shortly thereafter. He had made the trip hoping to benefit his impaired health, but was disappointed in the result. I kept in touch with several of the others for some time.
After two years I returned home by way of the Isthmus, when other and new interests claimed my time and attention, and I would only hear now and again that one and then another and yet others had left the trail and passed over the dividing ridge into the land where camps neither break nor move on.
The story of our trail has of necessity been told in monologue, as only I of all the number am here to tell it.
The pictures upon memory's walls, a few relics, and a golden band upon my wife's finger, made into a wedding-ring from gold that I myself had dug, are the links which unite these days to those days.