"How d'ye do, Limber Tim?"
The Forks had just been "struck." Some Missourians had slid into this crack in the earth, had found the little streams full of gold, and making sure that they had not been followed, and, like Indians, obliterating all signs of their trail, they went out slily as they came, struck the great stream of immigrants from the plains, and turned the current of their friends from Pike into this crack of the earth till it flowed full, and there was room for no more. The Forks was at once a little Republic; a sort of San Marino without a patron saint or a single tower.
A thousand men, I said, and not a single woman; that is, not one woman who was what these men called "on the square." Of course, two or three fallen women, soiled doves, had followed the fortunes of these hardy fellows into the new camp, but they were in some respects worse than no women at all.
As was usual with these fallen angels, they kept the camp, or certain elements in the camp, in a constant state of uproar, and contributed more to the rapid filling-up of the new graveyard up on the hill than all other causes put together. The fat and dirty little judge, who really wanted to keep peace, and who felt that he must always give an opinion, when asked why it was that the boys would fight so dreadfully over these women, and kill each other, said, "It is all owing to this glorious climate of Californy."
The truth is, they fought and killed each other, and kept up the regular Sunday funeral all Summer through, not because these bad women were there, but because the good women were not there. Yet possibly "the glorious climate of Californy" had a bit to do with the hot blood of the men, after all.
CHAPTER II.
LITTLE BILLIE PIPER.
Nobody knew when he came. Perhaps nobody cared. He was the smallest man in the camp. In fact he was not a man. He was only a boyish, girlish-looking creature that came and went at will. He was so small he crowded no one, and so no one cried out about him, or paid him any attention, so long as they were all busily taking possession of and measuring off the new Eden.
What a shy, sensitive, girlish-looking man! His boyish face was beautiful, dreamy and childish. It was sometimes half-hidden in a cloud of yellow hair that fell down about it, and was always being pushed back by a small white hand, that looked helpless enough, in the battle of life among these bearded and brawny men on the edge of the new world.