Climbing down from the car was like getting out of the world of reality, as represented by the Overland Limited (which, remember, had brought me from Chicago) into the Garden of Romance. I had left the comfortable but emphatically materialistic gorgeousness of the Pulman Palace-car, and I was actually standing on the same earth that Jack Hamlyn had trodden, and I was breathing the same air that he had inspired when he sang that famous song.
All around I could see gashes of red amid the green and brown of the slopes along the river banks—just such gulches as the one Tennessee lived in with his immortal partner. Somewhere up in the dark valleys through which the Overland Limited had just thundered the Outcasts of Poker Flat had found their last refuge, and John Oakhurst, after pinning that inscribed Deuce of Spades to the pine-tree with his bowie-knife, had passed in his checks like a gambler and a gentleman.
In just such a little schoolhouse as stood near the depôt, Mliss had flung down her astronomy book and paralysed one part of her audience and ecstasied the other by that famous heresy of hers re the Miracle of Joshua.
“It’s a damned lie. I don’t believe a word of it.”
Down yonder, in the lowlands across the river, not very far from its junction with a tributary, might have been North Fork and Poverty Flat; and just such a red hole as I found a hundred yards or so from the track might have been the forty-foot grave into which Dow descended “with a derringer hid in his breast,” making his last despairing search for water—and finding gold.
The clang of the bell and the soft “hoo-too” of the whistle called me back out of my dream as I was having a drink at just such a bar as the gallant Colonel Starbottle might have slaked his immortal thirst at. A few moments more and the tireless wheels had begun to revolve again, and we slid down the curving slopes leading to the broad vale of the Sacramento.
Two Snapshots up and down the Rio Sacramento, taken as the train was crossing the bridge.
On the way to the Golden Land I had fallen into conversation with a young Californian, a fine specimen of the Western race, of whom his country might well be proud, as he was proud of it.
“It’s God’s own country, sir. And when you’ve seen more of it you’ll think so,” he said, as we swept across the fat, fertile farmlands which lay beneath the foot-hills. “You’ve travelled a bit, you tell me; but I guess if you go from end to end of this country you’ll say you never struck one like it.”