He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches, and rose up.—[Page 40].
[IV.]
TWIN BABIES.
These twin babies were black. They were black as coal. Indeed, they were blacker than coal, for they glistened in their oily blackness. They were young baby bears; and so exactly alike that no one could, in any way, tell the one from the other. And they were orphans. They had been found at the foot of a small cedar tree on the banks of the Sacramento River, near the now famous Soda Springs, found by a tow-headed boy who was very fond of bears and hunting.
But at the time the twin babies were found Soda Springs was only a wild camp, or way station, on the one and only trail that wound through the woods and up and down mountains for hundreds of miles, connecting the gold fields of California with the pastoral settlements away to the north in Oregon. But a railroad has now taken the place of that tortuous old packtrail, and you can whisk through these wild and woody mountains, and away on down through Oregon and up through Washington, Montana, Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and on to Chicago without even once getting out of your car, if you like. Yet such a persistent ride is not probable, for fish, pheasants, deer, elk, and bear still abound here in their ancient haunts, and the temptation to get out and fish or hunt is too great to be resisted.
This place where the baby bears were found was first owned by three men or, rather, by two men and a boy. One of the men was known as Mountain Joe. He had once been a guide in the service of General Fremont, but he was now a drunken fellow and spent most of his time at the trading post, twenty miles down the river. He is now an old man, almost blind, and lives in Oregon City, on a pension received as a soldier of the Mexican war. The other man’s name was Sil Reese. He, also, is living and famously rich—as rich as he is stingy, and that is saying that he is very rich indeed.
The boy preferred the trees to the house, partly because it was more pleasant and partly because Sil Reese, who had a large nose and used it to talk with constantly, kept grumbling because the boy, who had been wounded in defending the ranch, was not able to work—wash the dishes, make fires and so on, and help in a general and particular way about the so-called “Soda Spring Hotel.” This Sil Reese was certainly a mean man, as has, perhaps, been set down in this sketch before.