“I’m having hard enough dodging to keep clear of fever’n ager now,” he told us. “You don’t seem to recollect what neck of the woods I come from. It’s a fever’n ager country out there for keeps. They can’t keep chickens there at all.”
“Why not?” asked Johnny innocently.
“The chills they get shakes all the feathers off’n ’em,” replied Yank, “and then they freeze to death.”
In the evening the main street was a blaze of light, and the byways were cast in darkness. The crowd was all afoot, and moved restlessly to and fro from one bar or gambling hell to another. Of the thousand or so of strangers we came in time to recognize by sight a great many. The journey home through the dark was perilous. We never attempted it except in company; and as Johnny seemed fascinated with a certain game called Mexican monte, we often had to endure long waits before all our party was assembled.
One morning our daily trip to the steamship office bore fruit. We found the plaza filled with excited men; all talking and gesticulating. The much tired officials had evolved a scheme, beautiful in its simplicity, for deciding which fifty-two of the three hundred should go by the first ship. They announced that at eleven o’clock they would draw lots.
This was all very well, but how did the general public know that the lots would be drawn fairly?
69The officials would permit a committee of citizens to be present.
Not by the eternal! Where would you get any one to serve? No member of that committee would dare accept his own ticket, provided he drew one. No one would believe it had been done honestly.
Very well. Then let fifty-two out of three hundred slips of paper be marked. Each prospective passenger could then draw one slip out of a box.
“It’s all right, boys,” the observers yelled back at those clamouring in the rear.