"Second the motion, somebody. Any body object to Sandy Jim?" said the first speaker. "Climb up on the box, Sandy, my boy."
Sandy Jim was a slender, blonde young man with quiet manners, and a style of speech which told of a good education. He mounted the box in the centre of the crowd, and having thus obtained a commanding position, he began, with correct parliamentary methods, to bring about order. Having requested silence, he inquired who had called the meeting. A man who acted as town clerk or some similar officer in the miners' vague system of government, explained that he had issued the call, to inform the miners that some one had settled upon a piece of land that had been set aside for town purposes, and, in spite of warnings to the contrary, was proceeding to erect a log house upon it; and that the tent temporarily occupied by the individual mentioned was already pitched upon the lot. As an officer of the camp he had felt in duty bound to call a meeting and let the boys decide what was to be done. Instantly there was a rattle of contradictory suggestions, everybody addressing everybody else, and forgetting to turn to the chairman. Finally a tall man with a heavy black beard mounted the box and addressed the meeting, arguing coldly and logically that the person had acted in defiance of the miners' meeting, which was the only law they had; and proposing that he be fined, and in case he resisted further, put in a boat and set floating down the Yukon. There was a general murmur of approval, and the chairman, putting the question to a vote, found a fairly unanimous verdict in favor of the speaker's suggestion.
"Before I appoint a committee," said the chairman, "the meeting should know who the person is who has to be dealt with, and I will ask the gentleman who called the meeting to give the information."
The clerk of the camp elbowed his way forward a little. "I've been trying to get a word in for a long time," he said. "I don't think we ought to be so hard in this case. You all know the person—it's Black Kitty. She's a woman, even if she is black and a fighter, and she's alone and working for a living. I move we go it easy."
Amid another buzz the tall bearded man got up and remarked: "That's different. I don't think any one wanted to quarrel with a woman, and a black one at that." This was only his way of expressing it, for he certainly did not mean that he would rather have quarrelled with a white woman. "Anyhow, there's plenty of land for public purposes out there in the brush, and I move an amendment that we let Kitty alone!"
In defiance of all parliamentary usage, this amendment was accepted with a chorus of approval by the crowd, which, satisfied with itself, scattered almost before the chairman could make himself heard, sanctioning and proclaiming valid the last expression of opinion.
Most of the miners returned to our cabin, where the auction began again, and lasted till twelve o'clock, by which time we had sold nearly everything we cared to, at prices a little above cost in Seattle. Wendling also succeeded in disposing of a hundred pounds of his tobacco, putting up lots every now and then. Some miners expressed surprise to Ross that we should use so much tobacco, and Ross winked and put his finger on his nose and said, "You don't know the inside, that's all. See that little feller over there?" indicating me. "That little feller chews a pound a day. Yes, sir! He eats it sometimes."
The next morning we weighed out our gold dust and found it some twenty-five dollars more than we had any record of, from which we inferred that the miners who had so kindly superintended the weighing of the various sums paid in had been a little generous, and always given full weight. When we got to San Francisco, and presented our gold dust at the mint, where it was weighed accurately, we received several dollars more for it than we made it from our final weighing; so it appears that the Yukon miner's currency is none of the most accurate. Stories were told around camp, of barkeepers who panned the sawdust on their floor and made good wages at it; and it was alleged that one had a strip of carpet on his counter, into which he let fall a trifle of gold dust every time he took a pinch for a drink of whisky, and at the end of the day, by taking up his carpet and shaking it, he had a nice little sum over his day's earnings.