He thrust away his watch and the pistol and with a shout of joy seized both my hands.
“Well! well! well! well!” he cried over and over again. “But I am glad to see you! I’d no idea where you were or what you were doing! Why couldn’t you write a man occasionally?”
“I don’t know,” said I, rather blankly. “I don’t believe it ever occurred to us we could write.”
“Where are the others? Are they with you?”
“We’ll look them up,” said I.
Together we walked away, arm in arm. Talbot had not changed, except that he had discarded his miner’s rig, and was now dressed in a rather quiet cloth suit, a small soft hat, and a blue flannel shirt. The trousers he had tucked into the tops of his boots. I thought the loose, neat costume very becoming to him. After a dozen swift inquiries as to our welfare, he plunged headlong into enthusiasms as to the town.
“It’s the greatest city in the world!” he cried; then catching my expression, he added, “or it’s going to be. Think of it, Frank! A year ago it had less than a thousand people, and now we have at least forty thousand. The new Commercial Wharf is nearly half a mile long and 405 cost us a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but we raised the money in ten minutes! We’re going to build two more. And Sam Brannan and a lot of us are talking of putting down plank roads. Think what that will mean! And there’s no limit to what we can do in real estate! Just knock down a few of these hills to the north─”
He stopped, for I was laughing.
“Why not drain the bay?” I suggested. “There’s a plenty of land down there.”
“Well,” said Talbot in a calmer manner, “we won’t quite do that. But we’ll put some of those sand hills into the edge of the bay. You wait and see. If you want to make money, you just buy some of those waterfront lots. You’ll wake up some morning to find you’re a mile inland.”