The loyalty Mollie had cherished to her early ideal of marriage burned low for lack of fuel to feed upon. Her husband had practically deserted her. When he returned to camp it was to bully money out of her or to get some of their small store of belongings to sell. In the intervals she might starve for all he cared.
There came a day when she definitely broke with her past life. She moved into town and opened a small shop where she sold home-cooked food to miners eager to buy her cakes, cookies, pies, and doughnuts. She called her place the Back Home Kitchen, and she did a thriving business. The members of the fire companies patronized the store a great deal, and since they ran to a large extent the political and social life of Virginia City, as they had done in San Francisco a few years earlier, her shop became so much the vogue that she had to employ a Chinese assistant to help with the cooking.
Scot watched the venture but offered no advice. He had, in fact, not spoken to Mollie since the day after the funeral. Vicky had been taken to Carson by Hank Monk on the stage and was writing back badly spelled but enthusiastic letters to her sister. The cards had been re-shuffled, McClintock told himself, and he was no longer sitting in at the game.
Meanwhile, the new camps of Nevada went their humorous, turbulent, and homicidal way. Men grew wild over prospects that never had a chance to become real mines. They worked on croppings, sold and bought feet in a thousand prospects, struck it rich, went stony broke again within the month. They were in bonanza or in borrasca[[8]], and in either case kept their grins working. They lived in brush tents, sack tents, or dugouts, and the hard conditions never disturbed their happy-go-lucky optimism.
[8] The Mexicans used to say that a mine was in bonanza when its production was high, and in borrasca before the vein was struck or after it had pinched out. With the adoption of the terms by Americans, the words took on a more general application. A bonanza was then any highly profitable venture; a borrasca was the reverse.—W. M. R.
They shared their last pot of beans with a stranger and were gaily confident that to-morrow they would strike a pick into the glory hole.
The saving grace of American humour salted all their adventures. The law in particular, when it made its belated appearance, was a merry jest. Those who dispensed it and those who dispensed with it enjoyed the joke alike.
Two women in Carson quarrelled over a cow. One accused the other of milking it secretly. The jury decided that the defendant was guilty of milking the cow in the second degree. A man in Virginia City was haled before the court charged with drunkenness, which in Nevada was held to be a right guaranteed a man by the Constitution. The constable Mike whispered to the justice that the arrested man had one hundred dollars on his person. “Are youse guilty?” the judge demanded. The defendant said he was not. “You know domn well yez are. I fine yez a hundred dollars, fifty for me an’ fifty for Mike,” the Court passed judgment. Sometimes the laugh was on the Court, as in the case of a justice, very hazy as to his powers and duties, who conducted the preliminary hearing of a man charged with murder. He listened to the evidence till he was satisfied, then announced his decision. “I find you guilty and sentence you to be hanged at ten o’clock to-morrow. The constable will bring the prisoner and a rope.”