There was one house to which she did pay constant visits. This was Mitty Sullivan’s, on the north side of town, near the Cresta Plata hoisting works.
These were booming days for Mitty. Her husband’s fortune was mounting in leaps too vast and rapid to be easily calculated. The Gracey boys’ belief in their superintendent had not been misplaced. The brawny, half-educated Irishman had risen to a commanding position, and was respectfully alluded to as having “the best nose for ore in the two states.” He was already very rich, having for the past four years successfully speculated on “inside information.” His great gains made even the princely salary he received on the Cresta Plata seem small. He was in the thick of the whirlpool now and Mitty was with him. She had a baby, a girl, and she saw it, backed by the fortune that she and Barney were making, going to Europe and marrying “a lord.” For Mitty’s horizon had widened with astonishing rapidity since the days when she waited on table at the Foleys hotel.
On one of the afternoons of Rosamund’s absence June walked across town for a chat and a cup of tea with her old-time friend. From B Street and its neat house-fronts and gardens she descended to the never-ending movement of the street below. This—the main stem of the mining city—for ever seething with a turbulent current of life, was the once famous C Street, a thoroughfare unique in the history of American towns.
The day shift would not be up for hours yet. When its time was up the mines would vomit forth thousands of men, who, penned all day in the dark, stifling heat of the underground city, would pour into the garish brilliancy of the overground one for the diversions of the night. Here, in the gusto of their liberation, they would range till daylight, restless eddies of life, passing up one street and down the other, never silent, never still, pressing vaguely on through the noise and glare, with the encircling blackness hanging round their little piece of the animated, outside world, like an inky curtain.
At all hours the street was crowded. Now it stretched up its mile or two of uneven length like a gray cañon, filled to both walls with a human river. Under the arcade formed by a continuous line of roofs that jutted from the second-story windows across the sidewalk, an endless throng passed up and down. They collected in groups before shop windows, overflowed the sidewalk and encroached on the middle of the roadway, congested in a close packed, swaying mass of heads in front of the bulletin boards where the stock quotations were pasted up, gathered in talkative knots at corners.
The street, in the mud of which playing cards, bits of orange peel, fragments of theatrical posters, scraps of silk and ribbon were imbedded like the pattern in a carpet, was as full as the sidewalk. The day of the overland freighters was past, but ore wagons still drove sixteen-mule teams, the driver guiding by a single rope, the mules bending their necks under the picturesque arches of their bells. Between these, busy managers flashed by in their buggies, stopping here and there to lean from their seats for a moment’s converse with a knot of men. In more fashionable equipages, brought up from San Francisco and drawn by sleek-skinned, long-tailed horses, the wives of suddenly enriched superintendents lolled back gorgeously, their beruffled silk skirts floating out over the wheel, the light flashing on their diamonds.
Over all this movement of life there was an unceasing swell of sound, a combination of many notes and keys, more noticeable by reason of the outlying rim of silence. Thousands of voices blended into a single sonorous hum, through which broke the jingling of pianos from the open doors of saloons, the click of billiard balls, the cries of the drivers to their mules, the raucous voices of street hawkers selling wares at populous corners, and the sweet, broken melody of the bells. Beneath this—a continuous level undertone—was the murmur of machinery, with the faint throb of the engines beating through it like the sound of the steady, unagitated pulse-beats of a laboring Titan.
June pressed through the throng, walking rapidly toward the upper end of C Street. Here, looking down on the dark red walls and tall chimneys of the Cresta Plata, stood the pretty, one-story cottage where Mitty Sullivan lived. It was surrounded by a square of garden, in which lilacs were budding and apple-trees showed a delicate hoar of young blossom. Mitty’s prosperity revealed itself in many ways. She had a nurse for the baby as well as a “hired girl.” She was exceedingly anxious to spend money and very ignorant of how to do it. She had passed the stage—a recognized station in the ascending career of the western wife—where her husband had presented her with diamond ear-rings. The silver, crystal, and Britannia metal in the superintendent’s cottage were astonishing; only to be rivaled in extravagance by the dresses which hung in Mitty’s own wardrobe and which had been ordered—regardless of cost—from the best dressmakers in San Francisco.
She greeted June with affection and drew her into the parlor, recently furnished with a set of blue and gold brocade furniture, the windows draped with lambrequins to match. There was a brilliant moquette carpet on the floor and the walls were hung with oil paintings, which Barney had bought on a recent visit to the coast. A quantity of growing plants in the windows added a touch of beauty to the glaring, over-furnished room.
Mitty herself had grown into a blooming matron, a trifle coarse, for she was fond of “a good table” and saw to it that her hired girl knew how to produce one, and already menaced by the embonpoint which is so deadly a foe to Californian beauty. The baby girl on her arm was a rosily healthy infant, with Barney’s red hair and her mother’s freshness of color. Twenty years later she would bring her share of the Bonanza fortune, which her father was then accumulating, to the restoration of the old New York family into which she was to marry. Her sister—yet unborn—was to do the same charitable act by the castle and estates of an English earl, who in return would make her a countess.