In the act of shoveling in Boston beans with his knife, the lean individual next Hildegarde paused to remark: “If a man had committed the worst crime in the calendar, it’d be a brutal punishment to make him sleep in the suffocatin’ black hole they’ve put me in.”
“Exactly—” began one of the three financiers, assuming the lean one to be agreeing with him.
“But,” interrupted the bean-feaster, “when they says t’ me they wusn’t no more room, I says, ‘Lookee here, it’s worth anywheres from fifty to sixty thousand dollars to me to be among the first to git there. You can put me in anywheres,’ I says. ‘Y’ can do anything in hell,’ I says, ‘except leave me behind.’ An’ b’ gosh they done it.” He champed his beans with a look that betokened renewed relish at having given the conversation an unexpected turn. Accomplished as this person was, he, with a plate full of Boston beans and a knife, could do nothing as original with his food as the passenger on the other side of the table next to the pretty girl. After one fascinated stare in his direction, Hildegarde felt it wiser to look away. It was not, however, that moment’s astonishing vision that prevented her from eating her own breakfast. The giant was charitably concerned. Try this, and that. But Hildegarde disposed of a little of the sticky gray porridge and condensed milk, a sip of the muddy coffee, and then she played with the sour bread while she listened to the conversation. Suddenly, whirling round her pivoted chair, she returned with ardor to the sunshine-flooded upper regions.
It looked as though every soul who wasn’t at the first breakfast must be on deck. In this clear and searching light Miss Mar’s traveling companions stood revealed—a strange, an unexampled crew. Scraps of German, of Swedish, of French, and of tongues to which she had no key, floated past her ear. In this new world of the Los Angeles, no color line discoverable, no alien labor law in force. Her eye fell upon the cryptic faces of the Japanese, and on familiar types of negro and mulatto, cheek by jowl with lawyers, clergymen, and senators. There were raw, red Irishmen, and overdone brown Hebrews. The captain went by talking broad Scotch to the English doctor, and the pig-tailed crew pulled at the cordage in unison to an uncouth Chinese chant.
And never was such sunshine, never shores so green, never before mountain ranges so ethereal, so softly touched with snow or wreathed in cloud.
But the people—the people!
The girl wandered about, all eyes, or sat in her long chair, for which there was hardly room now on the swarming deck. She held in one hand a little volume in which never a page was turned, for here, moving up and down before her, was matter more wonderful than any history written in any book. The thought she found coming up oftenest: What on earth takes him—or her—to Nome? For Louis, it seems, was in one thing right. Here was no Klondike company of sturdy pioneers, all men of brawn, or Amazonian women. Some such were in the throng, but the majority, weedy clerks and dyspeptic nondescripts. There went a man with only one arm to dig his gold. Several smartly dressed ladies flashed by with an air of being on their way to a garden party. Here was a hollow-chested youth with a corpse-like face, crawling painfully about with the aid of a cane. There were other children besides Curlyhead, and a number of quite old men—one grizzled creature with both feet “club.” What are they going to do in such a place as Nome? Hildegarde seemed to be the only one to wonder. Every face shining, every heart seemed lifted up. One and all were well-assured they had only to see Nome to “obtain joy and gladness.” “Nome is the place,” their faces said, “where sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
Here were the Blumpittys, looking a good deal battered, but he, at least, no gloomier than common, and she beaming like all the rest. Hildegarde got up to greet them. “I looked for you at breakfast.”
“We are having ours later,” quoth Mrs. Blumpitty, as one admitting habits luxurious. But since the second table had been summoned some time before it was patent that to be of the Blumpitty party meant you must eat at the third.