“But you read his advertisement?”
“I saw that column of fool nonsense he put in your paper—ef that's what you mean,” she said with decision, “but I didn't come here to see HIM—but YOU.”
The editor looked at her with a forced smile, but a vague misgiving. He was alone at night in a deserted part of the settlement, with a plump, self-possessed woman who had a contralto voice, a horsewhip, and—he could not help feeling—an evident grievance.
“To see me?” he repeated, with a faint attempt at gallantry. “You are paying me a great compliment, but really”—
“When I tell you I've come three thousand miles from Kansas straight here without stopping, ye kin reckon it's so,” she replied firmly.
“Three thousand miles!” echoed the editor wonderingly.
“Yes. Three thousand miles from my own folks' home in Kansas, where six years ago I married Mr. Dimmidge,—a British furriner as could scarcely make himself understood in any Christian language! Well, he got round me and dad, allowin' he was a reg'lar out-and-out profeshnal miner,—had lived in mines ever since he was a boy; and so, not knowin' what kind o' mines, and dad just bilin' over with the gold fever, we were married and kem across the plains to Californy. He was a good enough man to look at, but it warn't three months before I discovered that he allowed a wife was no better nor a nigger slave, and he the master. That made me open my eyes; but then, as he didn't drink, and didn't gamble, and didn't swear, and was a good provider and laid by money, why I shifted along with him as best I could. We drifted down the first year to Sonora, at Red Dog, where there wasn't another woman. Well, I did the nigger slave business,—never stirring out o' the settlement, never seein' a town or a crowd o' decent people,—and he did the lord and master! We played that game for two years, and I got tired. But when at last he allowed he'd go up to Elktown Hill, where there was a passel o' his countrymen at work, with never a sign o' any other folks, and leave me alone at Red Dog until he fixed up a place for me at Elktown Hill,—I kicked! I gave him fair warning! I did as other nigger slaves did,—I ran away!”
A recollection of the wretched woodcut which Mr. Dimmidge had selected to personify his wife flashed upon the editor with a new meaning. Yet perhaps she had not seen it, and had only read a copy of the advertisement. What could she want? The “Calaveras Clarion,” although a “Palladium” and a “Sentinel upon the Heights of Freedom” in reference to wagon roads, was not a redresser of domestic wrongs,—except through its advertising columns! Her next words intensified that suggestion.
“I've come here to put an advertisement in your paper.”
The editor heaved a sigh of relief, as once before. “Certainly,” he said briskly. “But that's another department of the paper, and the printers have gone home. Come to-morrow morning early.”