But the owner in fee simple of Nugget Bar’s sole hostelry was shamefully ignorant of the social requirements of a man in his position; indeed he was distinctly permeated by an air of social irresponsibility, and he only said, in a very deliberate way, without evincing the slightest curiosity regarding a possible patron:
“Ya-a-s, I presume ’tis; leastwise what’s left uv it.”
Again spoke Julius, with the unuttered appeal for comradeship still his predominant facial expression:
“Well, I’m Julius Anderly. ‘Jule’ mother always calls me at home, and that’s way back in Ohio, you know.”
The company remained unmoved by this piece of family intelligence, with the exception of a little dark man, lacking, physically, an eyebrow, and mentally, a happy disposition, who volunteered the remark that he “wunst had a cousin die in Ohio.” Julius ventured to lean against one of the supports of the wooden awning and continued:
“Things have been going pretty bad with our folks back there for some time. Pa died—let me see, this is July—three years ago last March, and after that the support of ma and the girls fell to me, which was about all pa had to leave, except the home. I guess we’d pulled through all right enough if the firm I had been keeping books for for over ten years hadn’t up and failed—went clean under and hadn’t a cent left.”
The various members of the group here expressed to each other, ocularly, their contempt for any man who “kept books,” all except the little dark man, whose face plainly expressed an inward conviction to the effect that the failure of that firm was due solely to Julius’s defective method of keeping said books.
It was rather discouraging, but Julius continued: “And there I was out of a job, which was pretty bad, I call it. Times were hard all round there and I couldn’t seem to get in anywhere else.
“We heard a good deal of talk about Californy, how so many were striking it rich here—I b’lieve that’s what you call it when a man finds a lot of gold—and we thought, that is ma and the girls and I did, that perhaps I’d better come out here, even if it was a long ways off, and see if I could find a gold mine or buy an interest in one or something. We sat up nights and talked it over and read a whole lot about how to come and what to do, and finally ma mortgaged the house for twelve hundred dollars, and I started out here with a thousand—round by the isthmus, you know.”