We did not believe this, though we could see no object in Don Gaspar’s deceiving us on the point. Three months 253 had passed while we had been isolated in the valley of the Porcupine; and we had not yet been taught what a difference three months can make in a young country. In that time thousands had landed, and the diggings had filled. All the world had turned to California; its riffraff and offscourings as well as its true men. Australia had unloaded its ex-convicts, so that the term “Sydney duck” had become only too well known. The idyllic time of order and honesty and pleasant living with one’s fellow-men was over. But we were unaware of that; and, knowing the average generous-hearted miner, we listened to Don Gaspar with a certain surprised skepticism.
“But I follow them,” said Don Gaspar, “and I offer them to pay; and after a while two of them come back with me, and we make a litter of branches with many blanket; and we carry Señor Yank down to the town. There is a town there now. And by good chance,” concluded Don Gaspar with a little show of quiet racial pride, “we find a California man and his wife, and they do their bes’ for Señor Yank, who is very essick, and I think he is now dead from the tramp of the horses. And we borrow the fresh horse and come back.”
It was indeed, as I think of it, a wonderful ride in the darkness; but at the time my mind was full of our poor friend. The others, however, thought only of the gold.
“We have left,” replied Don Gaspar to the rudely expressed shower of questions, “just the one half. It is well known to all that Señor Yank carried the most of the gold.”
254“Yes, and we have Munroe to thank for that,” snarled Missouri Jones.
“As far at that is concerned, I was against sending out the gold from the very start,” I retorted. “If you’d listened to me, it would have all been safe right here.”
“If we’d had a decently strong guard, we’d have been all right,” growled McNally.
We all saw the futility of our first instinctive flare of suspicion. It was obvious that if Don Gaspar and Buck Barry had intended treachery they would never have returned to us. I think that, curiously enough, we were unreasonably a little sorry for this. It would have been satisfactory to have had something definite to antagonize. As it was, we sat humped around our fire until morning. For a long period we remained sullenly silent; then we would break into recriminations or into expressions of bitter or sarcastic dissatisfaction with the way things had been planned and carried out. Bagsby alone had the sense to turn in. We chewed the cud of bitter disappointment. Our work had been hard and continuous; we were, as I have pointed out, just ready for a reaction; and now this catastrophe arrived in the exact moment to throw us into the depths of genuine revulsion. We hated each other, and the work, and the valley of the Porcupine, and gold diggings, and California with a fine impartiality. The gray morning light found us sitting haggard, dejected, disgusted, and vindictive around the dying embers of our fire.