He saw rude chairs and tables standing idly under dust of many, many years’ accumulation; chairs which had been pushed back violently as men sprang to their feet, some overturned and left to sprawl awkwardly until, as time ran by, they fell apart and in due time came to disintegrate as all other things physical crumble in the world.
He saw pictures tacked to walls, knew that they had been cheap colored prints or newspaper illustrations; thick earthenware dishes and utensils of iron and tin upon more than one stone hearth, invariably the homes of spiders; cupboards where food had lain and rotted, discoloring the unpainted wood; a thousand little homely articles which in the ordinary course of house vacating would have been packed and taken away.
Johnny’s Luck had been a mining town; for no other conceivable reason would men have made a town here at all as long ago as Johnny’s Luck gave every evidence of having been builded. And its life had been that of many another village of the far-out land in the days of the early mining madness.
Rumor of gold, strong rumor of gold, had brought many men and some few women, most of the latter what the world calls bad, some few perhaps what God calls good, to answer the call and the lure.
They had been so sure that they had builded not mere shanties, but solid homes of logs; they had remained here for many months—and then, no doubt, the bottom had fallen out of Johnny’s Luck. The vein had pinched out; the gold was gone.
And then, so did Sheldon reconstruct the past from the dust-covered ruin about him, word had come to Johnny’s Luck of another strike out yonder somewhere, beyond the next ridge, perhaps; perhaps a hundred miles away. That word had come into camp mysteriously as word of gold always travels; men had whispered it to their “pardners” and in its own fashion the word had spread.
There had been that first attempt at stealing away by stealth as some few hoped to be miles from camp before every one knew. Others had seen; men in that day attributed but the one motive to hasty, stealthy departure.
The stealing away had turned into a mad rush. Some one, a nervous man or an excitable woman, had cried out the magic word, “Gold!” And then homes had been deserted with a speed which was like frenzy; a few precious belongings had been snatched up; chairs and even tables overturned, and down the long street of Johnny’s Luck they had gone, fighting for the place at the fore, the whole camp. And, for some reason, they had never come back. Perhaps they had come to learn that Johnny’s Luck was unlucky.
It was simple enough after all, he told himself as he came at length to the base of the knoll upon which stood the cabin into which the girl had gone. Like everything else in the world, simple enough when once one understood.
Up and down the Pacific coast, from tidewater some mountainous hundreds of miles inland, how many towns had grown up like Johnny’s Luck, almost in a night, only to be given over to the wild again, deserted and forgotten in another night. There are many, some still lifting vertical walls, some mere mounds of grass-grown earth where one may dig and find a child’s tin cup or a broken whisky bottle.