While there, Toppy employed Aunt Liza, a negro cook. Aunt Liza came from Randsburg with an enormous trunk. She was a good cook, but an awful thief and nearly everything Toppy owned except the furniture disappeared piece by piece. When his razor vanished he looked through the trunk and found the loot. He didn't want to lose Aunt Liza, so he removed a few of the more needed things, leaving the rest to be recovered by instalments. Thereafter it was a game of losing and retrieving.
As strange a coincidence as I've ever heard attended the end of Toppy Johnson. Sent to Mexico when Pancho Villa was overrunning the country, he fled to Mazatlan when Pancho announced he would shoot on sight both native and foreigners who were not in sympathy with his marauding.
All boats were crowded with refugees, both native and alien, but Toppy was permitted to join the hundreds willing to sleep on deck. Toppy unwittingly chose a spot over the saloon where drunken celebrants soon began shooting at the ceiling.
A shot penetrated the flooring of the craft's deck and Toppy's abdomen. An American physician sleeping alongside was awakened by Toppy's groans, attended him, but saw there was no hope. The physician asked his name, the object being to notify the victim's relatives.
"If my doctor were only here," Toppy moaned, "he could save me."
"Dr. Samuel Slocum, of Pasadena," Toppy said, and died.
Thirty-four miles south of Ballarat at the end of a narrow canyon leading from Wingate Pass road into Death Valley, one comes upon a breath-taking riot of color. Pink hills. Blue hills. Hills of dazzling white, mottled with black and green. Yellow hills. Maroon and jade hills.
A gentleman of fine fancy and fluent tongue passed that way, learned that under the hills was a deposit of epsom salts. Then he went to Hollywood where salts met money. He talked convincingly of nature's drug store. "Just sink a shovel into the ground and up comes two dollars' worth of medicine recommended by every doctor in the country. No educating the public. Everybody knows epsom salts."
There was no flaw in that argument and Hollywood dipped into its pockets. A mono rail was strung from Searles' Lake over the Slate Range through Wingate Pass and up the slopes to the pink hills. There rose Epsom City. For awhile the balanced cars scooted along that gleaming rail, bearing salts to market--dreams of wealth to Hollywood.