"It was pretty dull," admitted Peabody.
"No life, no amusement; for all the world like a parcel of Methodists. What luck have you met with, stranger?"
"Beastly luck!" answered Peabody. "I tell you, Mr. Jack, California's a fraud. Many a time I've regretted leaving Boston, where I lived in style, and moved in the first circles, for such a place as this. Positively, Mr. Jack, I feel like a tramp, and I'm afraid I look like one. If my fashionable friends could see me now, they wouldn't know me."
"I ain't got no fashionable friends, and I don't want any," growled Missouri Jack, spitting on the floor. "What I want is, to meet gentlemen that ain't afraid to drink like gentlemen. I say, stranger, you'd better leave them Methodist fellers, and join our gang."
"Thank you, Mr. Jack, you're very kind, and I'll think of it," said Peabody, diplomatically. Though a little exhilarated, he was not quite blind to the character of the man with whom he was fraternizing, and had too much real refinement to enjoy his coarseness.
"Have another drink!"
"Thank you."
Peabody drank again, this time with a friend of Jack's, a man of his own stripe, who straggled into the saloon.
"Do you play euchre?" asked Jack, producing a dirty pack of cards.
"I know little of it," said Peabody; "but I'll try a game."