79. CHAPTER LXXIX.
I LAUNCHED out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness. I
had the field all to myself, for public lectures were almost an
unknown commodity in the Pacific market. They are not so rare,
now, I suppose. I took an old personal friend along to play agent
for me, and for two or three weeks we roamed through Nevada and
California and had a very cheerful time of it. Two days before I
lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed within
two miles of the town. The daring act was committed just at
dawn, by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches,
presented revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and
commanded a general dismount. Everybody climbed down, and
the robbers took their watches and every cent they had. Then they
took gunpowder and blew up the express specie boxes and got
their contents. The leader of the robbers was a small,
quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous manner and his
intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived.
The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate
"divide" and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there. The lecture
done, I stopped to talk with a friend, and did not start back till
eleven. The "divide" was high, unoccupied ground, between the
towns, the scene of twenty midnight murders and a hundred
robberies. As we climbed up and stepped out on this eminence,
the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight at our backs, and the night
closed down gloomy
and dismal. A sharp wind swept the place, too, and chilled our
perspiring bodies through.
"I tell you I don't like this place at night," said Mike the
agent.
"Well, don't speak so loud," I said. "You needn't remind
anybody that we are here."
Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of
Virginia—a man, evidently. He came straight at me, and I stepped
aside to let him pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me
again. Then I saw that he had a mask on and was holding
something in my face—I heard a click-click and recognized a
revolver in dim outline. I pushed the barrel aside with my hand
and said:
"Don't!"
He ejaculated sharply:
"Your watch! Your money!"
I said:
"You can have them with pleasure—but take the pistol away
from my face, please. It makes me shiver."
"No remarks! Hand out your money!"
"Certainly—I—"
"Put up your hands! Don't you go for a weapon! Put 'em up!
Higher!"
I held them above my head.
A pause. Then:
"Are you going to hand out your money or not?"
I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:
Certainly! I—"
"Put up your hands
! Do you want your head blown off? Higher!"
I put them above my head again.
Another pause.
Are
you going to hand out your money or not?
Ah-ah—again? Put up your hands! By George, you want the
head shot off you awful bad!"
"Well, friend, I'm trying my best to please you. You tell
me to give up my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put
up my hands. If you would only—. Oh, now—don't! All six of you
at me! That other man will get away while.—Now please take
some of those revolvers out of my face—
do,
if you
please! Every time one of
them clicks, my liver comes up into my
throat! If you have a mother—any of you—or if any of you have
ever
had a
mother—or a—grandmother—or a—"
"Cheese it! Will you give
up your money, or have we got to—. There-there—none
of that! Put up your hands!"
"Gentlemen—I know you are gentlemen by your—"
"Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are
times and places more fitting. This is
a serious business."
"You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have
attended in my time were comedies compared to it.
Now I think—"
"Curse your palaver! Your money!—your money!—your
money! Hold!—put up your hands!"
"Gentlemen, listen to reason. You
see how I am
situated—now don't put
those pistols so close—I smell the powder. You see how I am
situated. If I had four hands—so that I could hold up two
and—"
"Throttle him! Gag him! Kill him!"
"Gentlemen, don't! Nobody's
watching the other fellow. Why don't some of you—.
Ouch! Take it away, please! Gentlemen, you see that I've got to
hold up my hands; and so I can't take out my money—but if you'll
be so kind as to take it out for me, I will do as much for you
some—"
"Search him Beauregard—and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick,
if he wags it again. Help Beauregard, Stonewall."
Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to
Mike and fell to searching him. I was so excited that my lawless
fancy tortured me to ask my two men all manner of facetious
questions about their rebel brother-generals of the South, but,
considering the order they had received, it was but common
prudence to keep still. When everything had
been taken from me,—watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of
small value,—I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold
hands into my empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm
my feet and stir up some latent courage—but instantly all pistols
were at my head, and the order came again:
"Be still! Put up your hands! And keep them up!"
They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep
his hands above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman
said:
"Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you
hide behind that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind
that sage-bush there. Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows,
and if they take down their hands within ten minutes, or move a
single peg, let them have it!"
Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several
ambushes, and the other three disappeared down the road toward
Virginia.
It was depressingly still, and miserably cold. Now this whole
thing was a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of
our in disguise, and twenty more lay hidden
within ten feet of us during the whole operation, listening. Mike
knew all this, and was in the joke, but I suspected nothing of it. To
me it was most uncomfortably genuine.
When we had stood there in the middle of the road five
minutes, like a couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to
death by inches, Mike's interest in the joke began to wane. He
said:
"The time's up, now, aint it?"
"No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with
these bloody savages?"
Presently Mike said:
"Now the time's up,
anyway. I'm freezing."
"Well freeze. Better freeze than carry your brains home in a
basket. Maybe the time is up,
but how do we know?—got no
watch to tell by. I mean to give them good
measure. I calculate to stand here fifteen minutes or die. Don't
you move."
So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of
his contract. When we took our arms down at last, they were
aching with cold and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the
dread I was in that the time might not yet be up and that we would
feel bullets in a moment, was not sufficient to draw all my
attention from the misery that racked my stiffened body.
The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a
joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold
hill-top two full hours before I came, and there was very little fun
in that; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to
get warm again. Moreover, I never had a thought that they would
kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without
any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough
to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken. I was
only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally. Their
very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be
intentionally spilled. They were not smart; they ought to have sent
only one
highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they desired to
see the author of this volume climb a tree.
However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share
of the joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen;
for the chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration
gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease
and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me
quite a sum in doctor's bills. Since then I play no practical jokes
on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon
me.
When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure
journey to Japan and thence westward around the world; but a
desire to see home again changed my mind, and I took a berth in
the steamship, bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest,
heartiest community on our continent, and came by the way of the
Isthmus to New York—a trip that was not much of a pic-nic
excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and
we buried two or three bodies at sea every day. I found home a
dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had
known were now wearing
whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I had been
acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and
happy—some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in
jail, and the rest had been hanged. These changes touched me
deeply, and I went away and joined the famous Quaker City
European Excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands.
Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip"
to the silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to
occupy only three months. However, I usually miss my
calculations further than that.
MORAL.
If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no
moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any
account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but
if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you
will have to work, whether
you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing
to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them—if the people
you go among suffer by the operation.