THE MINER’S SUNDAY.
This is the Sunday sun that streams through the cabin window and through
the chinks of the cabin wall.
It is the same sunshine as that of the week day. Yet as the miner wakes
and realizes it is Sunday it has a different appearance and conveys a
different impression from that of the weekday sun. Everything seems more
quiet, more restful, and even more staid and serious. There belongs to
it and to the landscape as he looks out a flavor of far-away Eastern
Sabbath bells and Sunday morning’s hush and longer family prayer than
usual and Sunday-school. But there is not a church bell within ten miles
and there never will be one heard on this flat. There is not the least
approach to church society or religious organization or observance.
There is not, so far as known, so much as a man in the least religiously
inclined. We are a hard lot. No work on the claim to-day. The pick and
shovel will rest where thrown Saturday afternoon and only a trickle of
yellowish water from the reservoir will seep through the long line of
sluices instead of yesterday’s muddy surge rushing through--sand, gravel
and grating pebble and boulder.
But there is work of another sort to be done and a great deal of it.
After breakfast shaving. That small mirror of most imperfect glass,
whose reflection distorts the features, screwing up one side of the
face and enlarging the other in an unnatural fashion, is suitably
adjusted. A smell of soap pervades the air. He lathers and shaves and
relathers and reshaves with a tedious and painful precision, the while
making faces at himself in the glass as he brings one portion of his
countenance after another more directly under the sweep of the razor. In
some cases he comes off with a few scratches or leaves a hirsute oasis
here and there of uncut bristle. Black pantaloons, a white shirt, a felt
or straw hat, a linen duster and the Sunday boots. This is his dandy
outfit. In his pocket is a buckskin purse, once yellow, now faded to a
dull gray, holding gold dust, a few ounces more or less, perhaps five,
perhaps ten. It is the company dust and is to be sold and turned into
bright, yellow gold pieces. And why all this preparation? “To go to
camp.” Camp is three miles away over the mountain yonder. A group of
ramshackle cabins, alternating with saloons, three grocery stores, a
hotel, an express office and a Justice of the Peace, all in a hot gulch,
with hillsides long ago swept of trees, scarred with cuts and streaked
with patches of dry yellowish ledge. “Camp” to him has all the
importance and interest of a great metropolis. It is the centre of news.
The stage passes through it on the way to a larger camp. Two boss
gamblers reside there. There is a faro game on occasions, a billiard
table with a mountainous sort of bed, where the balls roll as they
please and after an eccentric fashion of their own.
The camp is for him the first nerve-centre of civilization and the only
outlet to the great world which he has left. You, fresh from the great
city, regard this dilapidated place as an out-of-the-way corner; but to
him, living on his remote flat, with but two cabins in sight for as many
miles, camp is a place of importance. The news is fresh here; the city
papers are here; the political candidates speak here; the one-horse show
comes here and all the minor lawsuits untried here. Camp is reached
after a long, hot walk. He suffers in his store clothes from the heat.
In his working every-day flannels he would not so much mind it, but the
restraint and chokiness of starched linen are fatiguing. It is laborious
even to be “dressed up” on a hot day. Of this he is not aware. He has
not yet so far analyzed into the depth and causes of sensations, yet it
is a labor in tropical weather to wear and bear good clothes--clothes
which cannot safely be perspired in; clothes which one can’t “lop down”
in; clothes which require care in the keeping, as well as dignity and
uprightness; I mean physical uprightness. He never so much suffered from
the heat on a week day as on Sundays and the cause was mainly the
difference between clothes which demanded consideration and respect and
those which did not.
He repairs first to the Magnolia. He has long in imagination seen it
from afar. How cool is the big barroom. The landlord keeps the floor
well wet down. That Magnolia floor is one of the few places where water,
unmixed with other fluid, is useful and grateful. How comforting and
soothing is the first drink. A long drink in a long tumbler, with plenty
of ice, soda water and whiskey. If heaven be anywhere as a material
locality it is in that first cool drink after a three-mile July tramp
over the kiln-dried hills and herbage of the California foothills. The
Magnolia is the social heart-centre of camp. There he finds the doctor.
The doctor drinks with him. The doctor drinks with everybody. There,
too, is the Justice of the Peace. The Justice drinks with him. The
Justice holds his Court at the Magnolia. The proprietor of the Magnolia
is the camp constable and between drinks during trials calls _viva voce_
the witnesses in the case. The Judge drinks with him. The Judge
generally drinks. The principal camp gambler is at the Magnolia. He
takes a light drink. He is a wise man and knows the advantage and profit
of keeping a cool head. The regular camp drunkard sits in the rear in
one of the arm-chairs back of the billiard table. He looks so humble, so
respectful--and so dry, that our miner’s heart moves to pity and he
“asks him up.” He complies, but not with undue haste. This treats of the
era between 1865 and 1870. The camp drunkard had not then so “lost his
grip” as to be unmindful of a certain slowness, deliberation and dignity
befitting a gentleman. But when he does arrive at the bar he takes a
“four-fingered” drink.
They stand in a row at the bar. The barkeeper is mixing the “long” and
the short drinks. Each man waits, says nothing and eyes every motion of
the bartender. The silence is impressive. All is ready. Each glass is
grasped and raised, and then from each to each, and more than all, from
all to the drink donor, there is a nod, that incantatory phrase is
uttered, “Well, here’s luck,” and the poison is down. As it rasps, they
call “Ahem!” with varied degrees of modulation. But this is a careful
and prudent miner and he now repairs to the store. There his dust is
weighed, sold, and the week’s provision ordered. His combined partners’
“divvys” are put aside in a lump and safely stored. Now the weight is
off his mind. He returns to the attractions of camp.
These are not numerous. There is the Magnolia, the Bella Union, the
Court Exchange, the post and express office. There are the “boys.” He
learns the news of the county or district. The Mount Vernon is paying
four dollars per day. Long Shortman has gone on another spree and hasn’t
done any work for the last ten days. Jimmy McNeil has sent for his
wife’s sister. She is unmarried. Sullivan has had another row with his
wife and she has complained to the authorities. Sam Gedney is going to
run for County Clerk on the Democratic ticket. Bob Delmame lost $200 at
the game the other night. A San Francisco company have bought the Crazy
gulch quartz lead and will put a ten-stamp mill on it. The schoolmaster
was drunk last Friday night. Ford shot at McGillis the other night, but
did not hit him. There is scandal and talk concerning the Frenchwoman
who keeps the peanut stand and the Justice of the Peace. The Wiley
girls, two sisters who have recently moved into camp, are making a
sensation, and their small parlor at times won’t hold the crowd of
semi-bald and unconsciously middle-aged miners and others who are
calling on them with possible matrimony in prospective. They may pass
along the street about the middle of the afternoon and such “ragging
out” was never seen before in this camp. The curious have investigated
the tracks made by their little gaiters in the red dust of the upper
road and report them the smallest feet ever seen in this section. Billy
Devins of the Blue-jay claim is thought to have the best show with the
eldest, and Goldberry of the lively stable with the youngest. No. He
won’t let his best horse and buggy to anybody now and takes her out
riding three times a week. But they’re snappy and uncertain, and nobody
can count on them for a certainty. So runs the week’s news, which he
picks up with sundry drinks.
He enjoys the luxury of a hotel dinner--a dinner he is not obliged to
prepare with his own hands--a decidedly plain dinner in metropolitan
estimation, but to him, commencing with soup and ending with pie, a
sumptuous repast. It is moonlight and he takes his way back by the old
trail home. Old not in years, but in association. It is but the track of
twenty years or so, yet for him how old is it in thought. How many, many
times he has travelled over it.
That poker game is going on in one corner of the Magnolia. The “hard
case” from over the hill is trying to beat it. He has been so trying
every Sunday night in that same saloon and in that same corner for the
last twenty years. He has grown old in trying. It has kept him poor, yet
he thinks he can play poker. He is encouraged in this impression by a
considerate few. He works for them. They “scoop him in” regularly. He
will go home to-morrow morning, and during the week wash out a couple of
ounces more for the benefit of “Scotty” and “Texas.” It is 11 o’clock
and time to go home. That three-mile walk is before him; he has taken as
many drinks as is prudent, possibly one or two more. The camp saloon
revelries are beginning to quiet down. Most of the prominent drunks have
fallen in the cause. The chronic drunk of the camp is talking at the
bar. But he will thus talk all night; he never stops talking--or
drinking. He has been here more or less drunk ever since 1852. He is
phenomenal and not a standard for ordinary intemperates. Almost every
camp has known such a drunkard. Some are alive yet. They are of the
immortal few not born to die. It would be madness to compete with such.
So he sets out on his lonely walk. Of how much has he thought while
plodding over it. Here the same big buckeye brushes against his face as
it did in the “spring of ’50,” when he was twenty years younger and had
a sweetheart in the “States,” whose memory was fresh and warm. It has
all died out since. The letters became less and less, the years more and
more, and then all came to a dead standstill and he received the village
paper, and there, appropriately below the column of deaths, he read of
her marriage, whereat he went to camp and plunged wildly into all the
concert saloon could give and made things howl and boldly challenged the
chronic poker game and won. The trail turns suddenly. It has run over
the rocks by the river, its trail at times for many feet almost
illegible, a vague smoothly-worn streak over ledge and loose boulders,
polished and strewn with new white sand and pebbles by some unusually
high freshet. But here the shelving bank suddenly ceases. It becomes a
precipice. Up the hard-worn path in the red earth he climbs forty,
fifty, sixty feet. It is closely hedged with chemisal. Now he emerges
near the brow of the high rocky bluff. In all its moonlit glory surges,
bubbles, and roars the river below. Its yellow muddiness of the day is
now changed to a dark shade of brown, with tremulous silver bars. Night
and the moon are the artists.