“And the year he died he had put away a hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars in the Californy Miners’ Saving Bank.
“And we might ‘a’ retired on that, but we was still in the prime o’ life, nyther of us forty years old then—and I’m not now—and so he said we could go on for another ten year and make another hundred thousand, and then go back to the East and live offen it in grand style.
“But, Lord! who can tell what a day may bring forth, let alone ten year? One autumn day he came home to me, in our shanty at Wild Cats’ Gulch, with a hard chill, and in two hours, just as the turn of the cold fit into the hot one, he had a little spasm and went right off.
“Well, I was all alone, having of no child’en. But the boys they was very good to me, and seen to the funeral and all that. And, after it was all over, I stayed on in the shanty, partly because I hated to leave it, and partly because the equinoctial storms had ris’ the rivers and carried away the bridges, and made the travel between Wild Cats and St. Sebastian awful hard and risky.
“In that first year of my widdyhood, I had a heap of offers from one and another of the boys, for there wa‘n’t many wimmin there; but I snubbed ’em all.
“It wasn’t till the next summer that I went to St. Sebastian to see about drawing out my money, or a part of it, to go East.
“Well, there at the Hidalgo Inn, I met with Col. Anglesea, and sorter got acquainted long of him. He had been out on the plains with a lot of English officers, a-hunting of the buffalo, or pretending to do it, and now he was on his way home, so he said—gwine to sail from ’Frisco to York, and then to Liverpool. He said as he had inwested half a million o’ money in Californy. Lord sakes, how that man lied!
“Then, like a plagued fool as I was, with nobody to advise me—don’t tell me about wimmen having any sense! They always get coaxed, or swindled, or scared out o’ their money!—I goes and tells that blamed beat and cheat about my hundred and twenty-three thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, and asks his opinion how I ought to inwest it.
“And he tells me cock-and-bull stories about companies, and shares, and per cents. and things that I knew nothing about. And he wanted me to give him the money to inwest for me, and save me the trouble and ’noyance.
“But I wasn’t quite such a donkey as that, nyther! I just wouldn’t trust him with a dollar! No more would I sign any paper that he brought me. No, not one! Yet I did like the insiniwating creetur’ to such an extent, even then, that I couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings by seeming to distrust him, and so I always made some excuse for not doing what he recommended.