“Of course I will, Mrs Benion; don’t be afraid. We’ll be back safe enough with our fortunes made before you’ve had time to miss us.” And he left her, hearing her first sob as he reached the door. Inwardly he thanked the fates that he was not married, for he felt vaguely that Benion was doing wrong in going. But of course he would come back safely, or, if anything were to happen, he himself would never return to Sydney to face the sorrow in that woman’s eyes.
The Amaranth was taking in the last of her cargo when they boarded her. She was full to the hatches, but a small deck-load of timber had to be stowed before they weighed anchor. About three o’clock she ran down to the Heads with the ebb-tide, and dropped her pilot before dark. Once clear of the land, Benion was in the wildest spirits; for they had at least a day’s start of the Reindeer, and they were a faster vessel and a bigger one. After dinner the captain was taken into their confidence; but the vision of gold-fields failed to tempt him, and he became restive. He not unnaturally wanted to know why he had not been told before. It was ten to one, he said, that his crew would desert, and where was he to get another? But Benion was prepared for this argument. If the gold-fields were good enough to make the crew desert, they were probably better than captain’s wages. Besides, he would be answerable to the owners. The crew had been got together in a hurry, and as there had been no selection, there was more than the usual proportion of grumblers. The wages were high, for it would have taken more than a day to get a complement for a cruise among the islands at the ordinary wages; but the islands were unpopular, and the men were half-hearted. When Benion had argued the captain into tacit acquiescence, he suggested that the crew should be let into the secret. “They’ve got to know it some time,” he said, “and why not now? When they know about the gold they’ll be as keen about the voyage as we are.”
He was right. From the time the announcement was made the work of the ship went like clockwork, and the voyage ended happily, and without any more grumbling: for since the days of the Argonauts, gold, whether in fleece or nugget, has ever had a powerful hold upon the imagination of sailors.
They made the land at sunrise. It was a perfect morning, fresh, but not cold. Before them were two mountain-ranges separated by a valley which, together with all the low-lying land, was filled with woolly vapour, absolutely motionless, and so level that it looked like the waters of a lake from which the mountain-tops emerged distinct in the clear air like islands. Then the rising sun struck them and crept down their sides in a flood of light till it touched the surface of the lake of vapour, tinging it with gold; and, as if by magic, the whole lake was set in motion, and rolled up the valley, where it was caught by the sea-breeze and whirled in great convolutions into the higher air, where it vanished.
They steered for two low promontories, upon one of which stood a ruinous fort bearing the Mexican flag. As they neared it the swell increased, for they were approaching the bar. The sea, so calm outside, broke angrily upon a sunken reef on their left, but the flood-tide helped them, and in a moment they were floating in calm water beyond the fort, with a magnificent view before them,—a broad sheet of water indented with coves and backed with pasture and woodland of the brightest green. The foreshore was less beautiful, for the tide was still low, and the beach was a waste of mud, from which a fetid steam had begun to rise that set the landscape a-dance. They dropped anchor between two barks that had every appearance of being deserted. Their running-gear was hanging loose, their yards were braced all ways as for a funeral, and their decks were littered with stores and rubbish as if the crew had left them in haste. Stranded on the mud was the hull of a schooner, her top-hamper touching the ground as she lay careened over. On shore the only dwellings to be seen were some ruined walls, round which a number of rough shanties of packing-cases, wreckage, and ships’ copper were clustered, and beyond these some hundreds of tents gleamed white in the morning sunlight from the fringe of forest trees. Such was the city of San Francisco in 1849.
Benion and Allen lost no time in going on shore. They stepped from the boat into a crowd of the hangers-on of the gold-field,—surely the strangest seething of humanity that the modern world can show! There were men of every nation and shade of colour, of every grade of society, of every creed and occupation, all flung together with the burning fever of gold-hunting hot upon them. And there were besides the ministers to their pleasures, their necessities, and their vices: storekeepers, without stores to sell; faro-bank keepers; saloon-keepers, cleared of their stock-in-trade; and the ministers to yet lower vices. Hundreds of new arrivals, unprovided with the few stores necessary to support life, and unable to buy at the famine prices of the place, were still awaiting the arrival of a ship.
As soon as it became known that Benion had brought stores he was set upon by the storekeepers and liquor-sellers, but he had made a stern resolve to retail everything himself and let no middleman profit from him. But the Reindeer might be in at any moment to compete with him, so that, after fixing upon a site for his tent, he sent part of his cargo ashore that very afternoon, and ensconced Allen as storeman.
So Allen bartered goods for gold-dust; and as their hoard increased, the friendship that is born of hardships endured in common grew between them.