well, "what are you talkin' about, anyway?"
"I mean what I say," returned Maxwell quickly. "He was going to see his sister, a mere child! Of course he can't go now. But he must see her, if she can be brought to him! Can you—will you do it?"
Jack cast another swift glance at Gabriel.
"Count me in!" he said promptly; "when shall I go?"
"Now—at once!"
"All right. Where shall I fetch her to?"
"One Horse Gulch."
"The game's made!" said Jack sententiously. "She'll be there by sun-down tomorrow!"
He was off like a flash, but as swiftly returned, and called Maxwell to the door.
"Look here," he said in a whisper, "p'r'aps it would be as well if the Sheriff didn't know I was his friend," he went on, indicating Gabriel with a toss of his head and a wink of his black eye, "because you see, Joe Hall and I ain't friends! We had a little difficulty, and some shootin' and foolishness down at Marysville last year. Joe's a good square man, but he ain't above prejudice, and it might go against our man." Maxwell nodded, and Jack once more darted off.
But his color was so high, and his exaltation so excessive, that when he reached his room his faithful Pete looked at him in undisguised alarm. "Bress de Lord God! it tain't no whisky, Mars Jack, arter all de doctors tole you?" he said, clasping his hands in dismay.
The bare suggestion was enough for Jack in his present hilarious humor. He instantly hiccoughed, lapsed wildly over against Pete with artfully simulated alcoholic weakness, tumbled him on the floor, and grasping his white woolly head waved over it a boot-jack, and frantically demanded "another bottle." Then he laughed; as suddenly got up with the greatest gravity and a complete change in his demeanor, and wanted to know, severely, what he, Pete, meant by lying there on the floor in a state of beastly intoxication.
" Bress de Lord! Mars Jack, but ye did frighten me. I jiss allowed dem tourists down-stairs had been gettin' ye tight."
"You did—you degraded old ruffian! If you'd been reading 'Volney's Ruins,' or reflectin' on some of those moral maxims that I'm just wastin' my time and health unloading to you, instead of making me the subject of your inebriated reveries, you wouldn't get picked up so often. Pack my valise, and chuck it into some horse and buggy, no matter whose. Be quick."
"Is we gwine to Sacramento, Mars Jack?"
"We? No, sir. I'm going—alone! What I'm doing now, sir, is only the result of calm reflection; of lying awake nights taking points and jest spottin' the whole situation. And I'm convinced, Peter, that I can stay with you no longer. You've been hackin' the keen edge of my finer feelin's; playin' it very low down on my moral and religious nature, and generally ringin' in a cold deck on my spiritual condition for the last five years. You've jest cut up thet rough with my higher emotions thet there ain't enough left to chip in on a ten-cent ante. Five years ago," continued Jack, coolly, brushing his curls before the glass, "I fell into your hands, a guileless, simple youth, in the first flush of manhood, knowin' no points, easily picked up on my sensibilities, and trav'lin', so to speak, on my shape! And where am I now? Echo answers 'where?' and passes for a euchre! No, Peter, I leave you tonight. Wretched misleader of youth, gummy old man with the strawberry eyebrows, farewell!"
Evidently this style of exordium was no novelty to Pete, for without apparently paying the least attention to it, he went on, surlily packing his master's valise. When he had finished he looked up at Mr. Hamlin, who was humming, in a heart-broken way, "Yes, we must part" varied by occasional glances of exaggerated reproach at Pete, and said, as he shouldered the valise:
"Dis yer ain't no woman foolishness, Mars Jack, like down at dat yar Mission?"
"Your suggestion, Peter," returned Jack, with dignity, "emanates from a moral sentiment debased by love-feasts and camp meetings, and an intellect weakened by rum and gum and the contact of lager beer jerkers. It is worthy of a short-card sharp and a keno flopper, which I have, I regret to say, long suspected you to be. Farewell! You will stay here until I come back. If I don't come back by the day after to-morrow come to One Horse Gulch. Pay the bill and don't knock down for yourself more than seventy-five per cent. Remember I am getting old and feeble. You are yet young, with a brilliant future before you. Git!"
He tossed a handful of gold on the bed, adjusted his hat carefully over his curls, and stole from the room. In the lower hall he stopped long enough to take aside Mr.
