A head shot into sight a few hundred yards astern, blowing the silvered water aside. The small boat, which was now afloat, immediately headed in his direction, and a moment later he was hauled aboard amid frantic cheers. The dripping victim of the accident clambered to the deck.
He was beside himself with excitement, sputtering with rage and uttering frantic threats against something or somebody. His eyes were wild, and he fairly frothed at the mouth. I seized him by the arm. He stared at me, then became coherent, though he still spluttered. Johnny was habitually so quietly reserved as far as emotions go that his present excitement was at first utterly incomprehensible.
It seemed that he had been leaning against the rail, watching the moonlight, when suddenly it had given way beneath his weight and he had fallen into the river.
"They had no business to have so weak a rail!" he cried bitterly.
"Well, you're here, all right," I said soothingly. "There's no great harm done."
Then we learned how the weight of the gold around his waist had carried him down like a plummet; and we sensed a little of the desperate horror with which he had torn and struggled to free himself from that dreadful burden.
And then he had torn off the belt, and had shot to the surface.
"It's down there," he said more calmly, "every confounded yellow grain of it." He laughed a little. "Broke!" said he. "No New York in mine!"
"Gol darn it, boys, it's rotten hard luck!" cried a big miner with some heat. "Who'll chip in?"
At the words Johnny recovered himself, and his customary ease of manner returned.
"Much obliged, boys," said he, "but I've still got my health. I don't need charity. Guess I've been doing the baby act; but I was damn mad at that rotten old rail. Anyway," he laughed, "there need nobody say in the future that there's no gold in the lower Sacramento. There is; I put it there myself."
The tall miner slowly stowed away his buckskin sack, looking keenly in Johnny's face.
"Well, you'll have a drink, anyway," said he.
"Oh, hell, yes!" agreed Johnny, "I'll have a drink!"
We drew up to San Francisco early in the afternoon, and we were, to put it mildly, thoroughly astonished at the change in the place. To begin with, we now landed at a long wharf projecting from the foot of Sacramento Street instead of by lighter. This wharf was crowded by a miscellaneous mob, collected apparently with no other purpose than to view our arrival. Among them we saw many specialized types that had been lacking to the old city of a few months ago--sharp, keen, businesslike clerks whom one could not imagine at the rough work of the mines; loafers whom one could not imagine at any work at all; dissolute, hard-faced characters without the bold freedom of the road agents; young green-looking chaps who evidently had much to learn and who were exceedingly likely to pay their little fortunes, if not their lives, in the learning. On a hogshead at one side a street preacher was declaiming.