"You save?" says the first.
"Yes, me save; do you save?"
"Oh, yes! I save."
Now, to any one—even if he had mastered Spanish without a master—who was unacquainted with the mode of speaking here employed, these brief sentences would seem an unintelligible jargon; and, before the least glimmer of light could reach his understanding, it would be necessary to dilute or translate them into at least as many pages of modern English. Yet, not only those who took part in the dialogue, but I myself, and all who listened to it, were in the highest degree edified and delighted at this instance of unequalled condensation, which I would respectfully commend to the consideration of all windy orators.
It was not till the 19th of November that the rainy season apparently commenced. During the night it rained moderately, and the wind blew with tremendous violence. The great pine overhead wrestled fearfully with the tempest, with its long-twisted arms, and occasionally sent down upon the tight drum-head of our canvass roof a shower of cones as big as a pineapple, that fell on our startled ears with the burst of a bombshell. We found it impossible to sleep, and, having roused the drowsy candle, huddled round the stove and amused ourselves with cracking pinenuts, of which we had, at different times, collected a plentiful supply. These nuts grow in the cones just mentioned, closely resemble in size and shape the meat of the almond, and are of a peculiarly rich and oily flavour.
Early the next morning, before we had finished breakfast, the heavy tramp of armed men, and a number of voices, called us hastily to the door. A large party were already assembled on the bank above us; and, through the tall hemlock that covered the hill towards the village, we saw all along the narrow winding path the glitter of polished pick and shovel. Hardly more sudden was the apparition of Clan Alpine's warriors on the side of Benledi.
Instant, through copse and heath, arose
Bonnets, and spears, and bended bows;
On right, on left, above, below,
Sprung up at once the lurking foe.
From shingles gray these lances start;
The bracken bush sends forth the dart;
The rushes and the willow wand
Are bristling into axe and brand;
And every tuft of broom gives life
To plaided warrior armed for strife.
Our visitors, however, were bound on a more peaceful errand. Some wag had started a wonderful story about the rich diggings in the Red Bank, which had produced just such an excitement in Natoma as the California fever in the Eastern States—all were anxious to obtain a share, and in a short time the whole bank, three or four hundred feet long, was staked off among the different claimants. The various disputes that arose were all amicably adjusted by arbitration, in which we as the earliest settlers were allowed the highest authority. Our decisions were marked by the strictest impartiality, and even indifference, for we believed the whole bank to be absolutely worthless; but after the leads were fairly opened, we discovered, to our infinite surprise and mortification, that several of them were far more valuable than our own. For months we had been lying idle, encamped in the very midst of riches; and now these new comers, aliens and foreigners to the bank, had taken them, as it were, out of our hands. Our folly, however, will appear more excusable when it is known that the whole place had already been prospected again and again, and even worked for weeks in two distinct locations by successive parties who had one after another given up in despair. We had ourselves made several trials in front of what afterwards proved to be the richest claim, and finding nothing, concluded, according to what was then considered the universal laws in such cases, that the bank would yield less and less the farther it receded from the river. An entirely new feature, however, was now introduced—instead of growing poorer, the bank became richer as the miners advanced, till they came in some instances to earth paying nearly a dollar to the bucket, when the lead gradually failed. This rich streak ran diagonally across the bank, so that, while at the upper end it was very near the front, it was found by those working at the lower extremity fifty or a hundred feet farther back. The value of all these claims was greatly diminished by the depth to which they ran, a superstratum of earth varying from five to fifteen feet in thickness having to be thrown off before they came to that containing the gold.
Our quiet camp now became the centre of a bustling neighbourhood—a road was laid out through the ravine close by our door for the purpose of carting earth to the river, and huge piles of earth and stones rose around us on every side. A party of slaves and free blacks, at work for an extensive landed proprietor who claimed a front of sixty feet, kept up an incessant laughing and chattering which would have shamed a monkey or a yahoo.
There was no longer any pleasure in being idle, and we determined to go to work with the rest without waiting any longer for rain. We made almost nothing in the morning, and I began really to doubt if we should ever succeed in earning enough to get home with; but the afternoon's work was much more encouraging. Our schemes were now all exhausted; we had nothing more to rely upon but patient, unremitting toil, and we determined henceforth to lose no more time in idle dreaming, but to work as long and hard as we could wherever we could make four dollars a day. We continued to mine in the immediate vicinity of our tent for the next two months, sometimes in our bank, and at others in the wide sandy slope between it and the river; and at the end of that time, besides paying all our debts, we found ourselves worth in dust nearly one hundred dollars apiece.