“You’re a bad cook, anyhow,” said Baldwin Burr, “to burn the bacon like that.”
“Burn it!” retorted O’Rook with an air of annoyance, “man alive, how can I help it? It hasn’t fat enough to slide in, much less to swim. It’s my belief that the pig as owned it was fed on mahogany-sawdust and steel filin’s. There, ait it, an’ howld yer tongue. It’s good enough for a goold-digger, anyhow.”
“In regard to that little bit of ambition o’ your’n,” said Bob Corkey, as the party continued their meal, “seems to me, Watty, that you might go in for a carriage an’ four, or six, when you’re at it.”
“No, Corkey, no,” returned the other, “that would be imitating the foibles of the great, which I scorn. What is your particular ambition, now, Mr Luke? What will you buy when you’ve dug up your fortune?”
The cadaverous individual addressed, who had become thinner and more cadaverous than ever, looked up from his pewter plate, and, with a sickly smile, replied that he would give all the gold in the mines to purchase peace of mind.
This was received with a look of surprise, which was followed by a burst of laughter.
“Why, you ain’t an escaped convict, are you?” exclaimed Baldwin Burr.
“No, I’m only an escaped man of business, escaped from the toils, and worries, and confinements of city life,” returned Mr Luke, with another sickly smile, as he returned to his tough bacon.
“Well, Mr Luke, if contrast brings any blessing with it,” said Edwin Jack, “you ought to revive here, for you have splendid fresh country air—by night as well as by day—a fine laborious occupation with pick and shovel, a healthy appetite, wet feet continually, mud up to the eyes, and gold to your heart’s content. What more can you desire?”
“Nothing,” replied the cadaverous man with a sigh.