Everything'll stop here.... Then, bye and bye, they'll come
back--busted! Mark my words, BUSTED! Is that business? No."
He went off shaking his head sagely. Benito puzzled, half resentful,
gazed after him. He abandoned the walk to the dock and returned with
low-spirited resignation to his tasks at Ward & Smith's store.
* * * * *
For several months gold rumors continued to come. Citizens, fearing
ridicule, perhaps, slipped unobtrusively out of town, to test their
truth. Kemble was back from a trip to the so-called gold fields.
Editorially, he made sport of his findings. He had seen feather-brained
fortune-seekers gambling hopelessly with fate, suffering untold
hardships for half the pay they could have gained from "honest labor."
Now and then a miner, dirty and disheveled, came in ragged clothes to
gamble or drink away the contents of a pouch of "dust." It was at first
received suspiciously. Barkeepers took "a pinch for a drink," meaning
what they could grasp with their fingers, and one huge-fisted man
estimated that this method netted him three dollars per glass.
San Francisco awoke to a famine in butcher-knives, pans and candles.
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