"And it's blow, ye winds, heigh-ho,
For Cal-i-for-ni-o;
For there's plenty of gold so I've been told,
On the banks of the Sacramento!"
It was only a little boy, singing in a shrill treble the sea chantey
which seamen sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and
break the anchors out for "Frisco" port. It was only a little boy who
had never seen the sea, but two hundred feet beneath him rolled the
Sacramento. "Young" Jerry he was called, after "Old" Jerry, his father,
from whom he had learned the song, as well as received his shock of
bright-red hair, his blue, dancing eyes, and his fair and inevitably
freckled skin.
For Old Jerry had been a sailor, and had followed the sea till middle
life, haunted always by the words of the ringing chantey. Then one day
he had sung the song in earnest, in an Asiatic port, swinging and
thrilling round the capstan-circle with twenty others. And at San
Francisco he turned his back upon his ship and upon the sea, and went
to behold with his own eyes the banks of the Sacramento.
He beheld the gold, too, for he found employment at the Yellow Dream
mine, and proved of utmost usefulness in rigging the great ore-cables
across the river and two hundred feet above its surface.
After that he took charge of the cables and kept them in repair, and ran
them and loved them, and became himself an indispensable fixture of the
Yellow Dream mine. Then he loved pretty Margaret Kelly; but she had left
him and Young Jerry, the latter barely toddling, to take up her last
long sleep in the little graveyard among the great sober pines.
Old Jerry never went back to the sea. He remained by his cables, and
lavished upon them and Young Jerry all the love of his nature. When evil
days came to the Yellow-Dream, he still remained in the employ of the
company as watchman over the all but abandoned property.
But this morning he was not visible. Young Jerry only was to be seen,
sitting on the cabin step and singing the ancient chantey. He had cooked
and eaten his breakfast all by himself, and had just come out to take a
look at the world. Twenty feet before him stood the steel drum round
which the endless cable worked. By the drum, snug and fast, was the
ore-car. Following with his eyes the dizzy flight of the cables to the
farther bank, he could see the other drum and the other car.
The contrivance was worked by gravity, the loaded car crossing the river
by virtue of its own weight, and at the same time dragging the empty car
back. The loaded car being emptied, and the empty car being loaded with
more ore, the performance could be repeated--a performance which had
been repeated tens of thousands of times since the day Old Jerry became
the keeper of the cables.
Young Jerry broke off his song at the sound of approaching footsteps, A
tall, blue-shirted man, a rifle across the hollow of his arm, came out
from the gloom of the pine-trees. It was Hall, watchman of the Yellow
Dragon mine, the cables of which spanned the Sacramento a mile farther
up.
"Hello, younker!" was his greeting. "What you doin' here by your
lonesome?"
"Oh, bachin'," Jerry tried to answer unconcernedly, as if it were a very
ordinary sort of thing. "Dad's away, you see."
"Where's he gone?" the man asked.
"San Francisco. Went last night. His brother's dead in the old country,
and he's gone down to see the lawyers. Won't be back till tomorrow
night."
So spoke Jerry, and with pride, because of the responsibility which had
fallen to him of keeping an eye on the property of the Yellow Dream, and
the glorious adventure of living alone on the cliff above the river and
of cooking his own meals.
"Well, take care of yourself," Hall said, "and don't monkey with the
cables. I'm goin' to see if I can't pick up a deer in the Cripple Cow
Cañon."
"It's goin' to rain, I think," Jerry said, with mature deliberation.
"And it's little I mind a wettin'," Hall laughed, as he strode away
among the trees.
Jerry's prediction concerning rain was more than fulfilled. By ten
o'clock the pines were swaying and moaning, the cabin windows rattling,
and the rain driving by in fierce squalls. At half past eleven he
kindled a fire, and promptly at the stroke of twelve sat down to his
dinner.
No out-of-doors for him that day, he decided, when he had washed the few
dishes and put them neatly away; and he wondered how wet Hall was and
whether he had succeeded in picking up a deer.
At one o'clock there came a knock at the door, and when he opened it a
man and a woman staggered in on the breast of a great gust of wind. They
were Mr. and Mrs. Spillane, ranchers, who lived in a lonely valley a
dozen miles back from the river.
"Where's Hall?" was Spillane's opening speech, and he spoke sharply and
quickly.
Jerry noted that he was nervous and abrupt in his movements, and that
Mrs. Spillane seemed laboring under some strong anxiety. She was a thin,
washed-out, worked-out woman, whose life of dreary and unending toil had
stamped itself harshly upon her face. It was the same life that had
bowed her husband's shoulders and gnarled his hands and turned his hair
to a dry and dusty gray.
"He's gone hunting up Cripple Cow," Jerry answered. "Did you want to
cross?"
The woman began to weep quietly, while Spillane dropped a troubled
exclamation and strode to the window. Jerry joined him in gazing out to
where the cables lost themselves in the thick downpour.
It was the custom of the backwoods people in that section of country
to cross the Sacramento on the Yellow Dragon cable. For this service a
small toll was charged, which tolls the Yellow Dragon Company applied to
the payment of Hall's wages.
"We've got to get across, Jerry," Spillane said, at the same time
jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his wife. "Her
father's hurt at the Clover Leaf. Powder explosion. Not expected to
live. We just got word."
Jerry felt himself fluttering inwardly. He knew that Spillane wanted to
cross on the Yellow Dream cable, and in the absence of his father he
felt that he dared not assume such a responsibility, for the cable had
never been used for passengers; in fact, had not been used at all for a
long time.
"Maybe Hall will be back soon," he said.