“Wallopin’!” echoed a staid miner. “I’d gie my claim, an’ throw in my pile to boot, to be a young ’un an’ git walloped by them playthings of han’s.”
“Jest see how she throwed dirt an’ water on them boots,” said another, extending an enormous ugly boot. “Them boots ain’t fur sale now—them ain’t.”
“Them be durned!” contemptuously exclaimed another. “She tramped right on my toes as she backed out uv the crowd.”
Every one looked jealously at the last speaker, and a grim old fellow suggested that the aforesaid individual had obtained a trampled foot by fraud, and that each man in camp had, consequently, a right to demand satisfaction of him.
But the judge decided that he of the trampled foot was right, and that any miner who wouldn’t take such a chance, whether fraudulently or otherwise, hadn’t the spirit of a man in him.
Yankee Sam, the shortest man in camp, withdrew from the crowd, and paced the banks of the creek, lost in thought. Within half an hour Sam was owner of the only store in the place, had doubled the prices of all articles of clothing contained therein, and increased at least six-fold the price of all the white shirts.
Next day the sun rose on Bottle Flat in his usual conservative and impassive manner. Had he respected the dramatic proprieties, he would have appeared with astonished face and uplifted hands, for seldom had a whole community changed so completely in a single night.
Uncle Hans, the only German in the camp, had spent the preceding afternoon in that patient investigation for which the Teutonic mind is so justly noted. The morning sun saw over Hans’s door a sign, in charcoal, which read, “Shavin’ Dun Hier”; and few men went to the creek that morning without submitting themselves to Hans’s hands.
Then several men who had been absent from the saloon the night before straggled into camp, with jaded mules and new attire. Carondelet Joe came in, clad in a pair of pants, on which slender saffron-hued serpents ascended graceful gray Corinthian columns, while from under the collar of a new white shirt appeared a cravat, displaying most of the lines of the solar spectrum.
Flush, the Flat champion at poker, came in late in the afternoon, with a huge watch-chain, and an overpowering bosom-pin, and his horrid fingers sported at least one seal-ring each.