And I look
forward confidently to the day when I shall ship you out in a
lead-lined box and burden the San Francisco end with the trouble of
winding up your estate. You are a fixture, and you know it."
As he talked he constantly acknowledged greetings from the passers-by.
Those who knew him were mainly old-timers and he knew them all by name,
though there was scarcely a newcomer to whom his face was not familiar.
"I'll jest bet I'll be in Paris in 1900," the Eldorado king protested
feebly.
But Jacob Welse did not hear. There was a jangling of gongs as
McGregor saluted him from the pilot-house and the Laura slipped out
from the bank. The men on the shore filled the air with good-luck
farewells and last advice, but the three hundred grubless ones, turning
their backs on the golden dream, were moody and dispirited, and made
small response. The Laura backed out through a channel cut in the
shore-ice, swung about in the current, and with a final blast put on
full steam ahead.
The crowd thinned away and went about its business, leaving Jacob Welse
the centre of a group of a dozen or so. The talk was of the famine,
but it was the talk of men. Even Dave Harney forgot to curse the
country for its sugar shortage, and waxed facetious over the
newcomers,--_chechaquos_, he called them, having recourse to the Siwash
tongue.
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