Budd Boyd's Triumph; or, The Boy-Firm of Fox Island

by William P. Chipman

There were pickaxes and shovels, powder and boots, needles and coffee, spikes and tea, horseshoes and tobacco; there were wooden houses ready to be put up; canvas tents and mattresses; there were jackknives, hatchets, revolvers, rifles, socks, books, hats, clothes, barrels of flour, soap, coal, towels, sugar, potatoes, grindstones, locks, quack medicines, old periodicals, cheap watches, buttons, cotton, glass, tape, bottles, jewsharps, nails, rubbers; and everything else that the imaginative mind of a wild speculator could possibly think of as being likely to sell to a young and rich but destitute community.

Whether the speculation was successful or not, is no business of ours. My business is with Tom Allan, the cabin boy of the Janet.

The Janet took out about fifty passengers on their way to the gold diggings. Allan was a stout lad of about seventeen. When he left home he had no idea of digging gold, but the talk of the passengers on the way out fairly turned the heads of the crew of the Janet, and even of the officers, so that when the brig reached San Francisco, and the passengers landed, the entire crew, together with the cook, the second mate, and even the first mate, landed with them.

The captain was left alone with the cabin boy. The captain was in despair. He couldn't get anybody to unload his vessel. He couldn't get any crew to take her away. And so the end of it was that Allan yielded to the universal feeling and took his departure from the ship.

For about a year he led a queer kind of a life. He worked at various diggings without much success, until at length he got possession of a claim all to himself, in a remote locality, which he proceeded to work at with desperate determination.

He erected a little hut, and made himself as comfortable as possible, and set to work vigorously, and soon found, to his great delight, that the claim was one of unusual richness.

At last, then, after more than a year of adverse fortune, he saw his way to success.

One day he was hard at work. He had found a rich vein of quartz in which the gold was very plentiful, so much so, indeed, that it was possible for him to extract it by his own clumsy tools without having recourse to a crushing mill.

He had that day been drilling a hole to make ready for a blast, and was working away diligently with his drill. The hole was just finished, when suddenly he was startled by a deep and formidable growl close behind him.

So great was the shock of this unexpected interruption, that the drill dropped from his hands, and he turned around in horror. That horror was increased by the sight that he saw. For there, not a dozen yards away, was a monstrous grizzly bear--one of the largest of his species, crouching low, and regarding him with eyes that gleamed like coals of fire.