“I should not do that. A man is fortunate in getting rid of a wife, who would treat him after that fashion. Your thanks are rather due to your fair-dealing friend, for relieving you of any further trouble with such a woman.”
“There’s some truth in what you say,” rejoined Farrell. “But I don’t like being humbugged. He was such a plain-speaking fellow, I wonder why he didn’t tell me what he was intending to do, and who was writing to him all the time. In that case, perhaps, I should have made no objection to his running away with her. But there is one thing, I should have decidedly objected to.”
“What is that?”
“Furnishing the money to pay their travelling expenses—as well as to keep them comfortably wherever they have gone.”
“Did you do that?”
“I did. When Foster left the Stanislaus to go home, I entrusted all my gold to him—to take home to my precious wife. For all his frank open ways, and plain-speaking, he did not tell me that he intended to assist my wife in spending it; and that’s what gives me the greatest chagrin. I’ve been regularly sold. Over every dollar of that money—as they are eating or drinking it—will they be laughing at the fool who worked so damned hard to make it. Now I don’t like that; and I should like to know who would. Would you?”
“Not exactly. But where do you expect to find them?”
“In this city—San Francisco.”
“What! They surely would not be such simpletons as to come out to California, and you here?”
“That’s just what they’ll do,” replied Farrell. “They’ll think their best plan to keep clear of me, will be to leave the States, and get out here, by the time I would be likely to reach home. They will expect me to start from this place, the moment I hear the news of their elopement; and that by coming here, they will be safe not to see me again—thinking I would never return to California. For that reason I don’t intend going home at all; but shall stay here till they arrive.”