Adventure, November 1915 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

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But he was older than most of us an’ we thought he was a fine sort, as youngsters will, lookin’ for short-cuts to be smart. He got to be the leader of a gang of about a dozen of us, all off the ship ’cept a chap named Chappell—‘Chappie’ we used to call him. He’d come from Australy— some said he was a Botany Bay man, a con- vict who’d cut loose. He was another bad one. I reckon they wasn’t a heap to choose between any of us, on’y some knew more’n the rest. But we was all eager to learn. - “The upshot of it was that we got into trouble at Fort Sutter; Henley, Chappie, me an’ a couple of others. They suspected Henley an’ Chappie of crooked work with the cards an’ we was identified with ’em. If they’d bin sure they’d likely have lynched the crowd of us, but they give us the bene- fit of the doubt and ran us out of the fort. - That queered us in Sacramento an’ most everywhere for that matter, so we split up. “T got a job washing dishes, when I was hungry enough to eat the scraps off ’em, an’ makin’ beds for better men. I called ’em luckier men then. What they was, was honester. But the gang had all taken up Henley’s an’ Chappie’s p’int of view, which was to let the other fellow do the diggin’ an’ get the gold out of him some easier way. “T was pretty sick of playin’ chamber- maid, an’ when Henley showed up one night I was ripe to listen to him. His talk sound- ed good to me. I suppose there never was a kid yet who didn’t think it great to be a highwayman or a pirate, an’ I was only a half-baked kid; at that. “There were four men staying in the place where I was working who had made a big clean-up on the North Fork of the American. They had been the first to work on the big placer bars an’ they had struck it rich, mighty rich, so that folks pointed them out on the street. ! “‘They’d cleaned up half a million apiece, talk said, though we found out later that it was about two hundred thousand, an’ they had declared themselves as ag’in goin’ down to San Francisco on the river steamers. The steamers was jest plain floatin’ hells, what with the gambling goin’ on and the crowd that hung ’roun’ the men who’d made their stakes. So these four—they’d come ’roun’ the Horn, same as we had, an’ had some workin’ knowledge of seamanship—figgered on gettin’ hold of a schooner an’ a skipper an’ sailin’ direct to the Isthmus, doin’ their own work, sailors bein’ scarce, an’ so keep- in’ out of the way of the rough crowd on the steamers an’ in San Francisco, an’ play- in’ guard to their own gold. “Henley put it up to me to find out their plans, an’ I, like a young fool, was proud of the job. I used to be in their room on an’ off servin’ drinks, an’ I learned easy enough that they had made a dicker with the cap- tain of a schooner to hire the ship at a top price to take them to the Isthmus. The skipper would pick up a crowd there bound for the diggin’s an’ make good money both ways. ‘The skipper’s name was Ellersby. He was a hard drinker in spells an’ generally a rotten lot, but he could navigate and they didn’t have much choice. | “First off, Henley had the idea of a crowd of us shippin’ as sailors, but he decided it ud look too suspicious when nobody, un- less they’d made their pile, was leavin’. Also we was still liable to be recognized in a bunch as the crowd that was run out of Fort Sutter. So he got to makin’ friends with Ellersby, the skipper, drinkin’ with him an’ stickin’ close while the schooner was gettin’ provisioned up, an’ one night he got the bunch of us together—they was four, outside of Henley, Chappell and me— an’ told us the skipper had promised to come into the scheme for an equal share, meanin’ an eighth. “There was a sloop, not seaworthy but good enough for a calm river trip, that he figgered on stealin’. The seven of us was to run down to where the San Joaquin River runs into the Sacramento at Carquinez Straits, up at the north end of San Francis- co Bay. There’s a lot of islands there—a delta, they calls it—an’ we was to ’stablish ourselves on one of these an’ wait for Ellers- by to come along at nightfall an’ run the schooner on to a mud flat. “Tt worked out to a charm. We got the Hin wae re Ct com (Q) OO KS,