He pointed to some great boulders, from three to six feet in diameter. Some operation of a mystical kind had been performed upon them, for they were jagged and chipped as if they had been filed and cut into shape by a sculptor who had been once a dentist and still loved the profession.
"The miners picked the bones of those rocks, but they never pick quite clean. Then the Chinamen come and finish off. Gentlemen, it's a special Providence that you picked me up. I don't altogether admire the way in which that special Providence was played up to in the matter of the bar; but a Christian without a revolver alone among twenty Chinamen——"
He stopped and shrugged his shoulders.
"They'd have got my Luck," he concluded.
"Chief, I don't like it;" said the younger man. "It's ghostly. It's a town of dead men. As soon as it is dark the ghosts will rise and walk about—play billiards, I expect. What shall we do?"
"Hotel," growled the chief. "Sleep on floor—sit on chairs—eat off a table."
They entered the hotel.
A most orderly bar: the glasses there; the bright-coloured bottles: two or three casks of Bourbon whisky; the counter; the very dice on the counter with which the bar-keeper used to "go" the miners for drinks. How things at once so necessary to civilised life and so portable as dice were left behind, it is impossible to explain.
Everything was there except the drink. The greasers tried the casks and examined the bottles. Emptiness. A miner may leave behind him the impedimenta, but the real necessaries of life—rifle, revolver, bowie, and cards—he takes with him. And as for the drink, he carries that away too for greater safety, inside himself.
The English servant looked round him and smiled superior.