Chapter Eight.
The Yankee Sailor’s Yarn.
I warn’t never meant for no sailor, I warn’t; but I come of a great nation, and when a chap out our way says he’ll du a thing, he does it. I said I’d go to sea, and I went—and thar you are. I said I’d drop hunting, and take to mining, and thar I was; and that’s how it come about.
You see, we was rather rough out our way, where Hez Lane and me went with our bit of tent and pickers, shooting-irons, and sech-like, meaning to make a pile of gold. We went to Washoe, and didn’t get on; then we went to Saint Laramie, and didn’t get on there. Last, we went right up into the mountains, picking our way among the stones, for Hez sez, “Look here, old hoss, let’s get whar no one’s been afore. If we get whar the boys are at work already, they’ve took the cream, and we gets the skim milk. Let’s you and me get the cream, and let some o’ the others take the skim milk.”
“Good for you,” I says; and we tramped on day after day, till we got right up in the heart o’ the mountains, where no one hadn’t been afore, and it was so still and quiet, as it made you quite deaf.
It was a strange, wild sort of place, like as if one o’ them coons called giants had driven a wedge into a mountain, and split it, making a place for a bit of a stream to run at the bottom, and lay bare the cold we wanted to find.
“This’ll do, Dab,” says Hez, as we put up our bit of a tent on a pleasant green shelf in the steep valley place. “This’ll do, Dab; thar’s yaller gold spangling them sands, and running in veins through them rocks, and yaller gold in pockets of the rock.”
“Then, let’s call it Yaller Gulch,” I says.
“Done, old hoss!” says Hez; and Yaller Gulch it is.
We set to work next day washing in the bit of a stream, and shook hands on our luck.