“So I’ve heard,” murmured Gault.
“And when I think of this street later on, this street alone, in, say, ’70—how it boiled and bubbled and sizzled with life! Those were the days to live in!”
“Undoubtedly,” acquiesced the listener. He was afraid the colonel had only come to continue the reminiscences on the historic ground of his early gains and losses, and he ran over in his mind the excuses he could use to politely and speedily get rid of the old man.
But the colonel, it appeared, had another end in view.
“I don’t find, however,” he continued, “that my full-jumping pays very well. I’ve got the energy and the savvy, but the luck isn’t with me. And I’m too old a Californian not to know there’s no good bucking against bad luck.”
He paused and tapped with the tip of his cane against the side of the desk, evidently expecting his companion to speak. This time, however, Gault vouchsafed no reply, but sat looking at him with a steady and somewhat frowning intentness.
The colonel continued, nothing abashed:
“I’ve run into bad luck belts before, but never as wide a one as this. It’s about the biggest I’ve struck yet, and I’ve had some experience. Not that it’s knocked me out,” he said, looking up and speaking with quick, genuine earnestness—“don’t imagine that.”
“Nothing is farther from my mind,” said Gault; for the old man’s look demanded an answer.
“For an old-timer like me, privations, misfortunes, poverty, don’t matter. We pioneers who came round the isthmus and across the plains aren’t afraid of a little more roughing it to finish up on. A day without dinner don’t frighten us, and we don’t put our fingers in our mouths and cry because we haven’t got sheets to our beds or fires in our stoves. But when you’ve women in your corral it’s different—especially women that haven’t always seen the rough side of things.”