It was stirring and gay, but Melpomene’s pathetic face was always under that laughing mask of comedy.
This is the unpromising origin of our Sierra civilization. It may be instructive to note some early steps of improvement: a protest, first silent, then loud, which went up against disorder and crime; and later, the inauguration of justice, in form, if not in reality.
There occurs to me an incident illustrating these first essays in civil law; it is vouched for by my friend, an unwilling actor in the affair.
Exactly why horse-stealing should have been so early recognized as a heinous sin it is not easy to discover; however that might be, murderers continued to notch the number of their victims on neatly kept hilts of pistols or knives, in comparative security, long after the horse thief began to meet his hempen fate.
Early in the fifties, on a still, hot summer’s afternoon, a certain man, in a camp of the northern mines which shall be nameless, having tracked his two donkeys and one horse a half-mile, and discovering that a man’s track with spur-marks followed them, came back to town and told “the boys,” who loitered about a popular saloon, that in his opinion “some Mexican had stole the animals.”
Such news as this naturally demanded drinks all around. “Do you know, gentlemen,” said one who assumed leadership, “that just naturally to shoot these Greasers ain’t the best way. Give ’em a fair jury trial, and rope ’em up with all the majesty of law. That’s the cure.”
Such words of moderation were well received, and they drank again to “Here’s hoping we ketch that Greaser.”
As they loafed back to the veranda a Mexican walked over the hill brow, jingling his spurs pleasantly in accord with a whistled waltz.
The advocate for law said in undertone, “That’s the cuss.”
A rush, a struggle, and the Mexican, bound hand and foot, lay on his back in the bar-room. The camp turned out to a man.