time.  He don’t preach no cut-and-dried gospel; he don’t carry around no slop-shop robes and clap ’em on you whether they fit or not; but he samples and measures the camp afore he wades into it.  He scouts and examines; he ain’t no mere Sunday preacher with a comfortable house and once-a-week church, but he gives up his days and nights to it, and makes his family work with him, and even sends ’em forward to explore the field.  And he ain’t no white-choker shadbelly either, but fits himself, like his gospel, to the men he works among.  Ye ought to hear him afore you go.  His tent is just out your way.  I’ll go with you.”

Too dejected to offer any opposition, and perhaps a little curious to see this man who had unwittingly frustrated their design of lynching Bulger, they halted at the outer fringe of worshipers who packed the huge inclosure.  They had not time to indulge their cynicisms over this swaying mass of emotional, half-thinking, and almost irresponsible beings, nor to detect any similarity between their extreme methods and the scheme of redemption they themselves were seeking, for in a few moments, apparently lifted to his feet on a wave of religious exultation, the famous preacher arose.  The men of Rattlesnake gasped for breath.

It was Bulger!

But Briggs quickly recovered himself.  “By what name,” said he, turning passionately towards his guide, “does this man—­this impostor—­call himself here?”

“Baker.”

“Baker?” echoed the Rattlesnake contingent.

“Baker?” repeated Lance Forester, with a ghastly smile.

“Yes,” returned their guide.  “You oughter know it too!  For he sent his wife and daughters over, after his usual style, to sample your camp, a week ago!  Come, now, what are you givin’ us?”

IN THE TULES

He had never seen a steamboat in his life.  Born and reared in one of the Western Territories, far from a navigable river, he had only known the “dugout” or canoe as a means of conveyance across the scant streams whose fordable waters made even those scarcely a necessity.  The long, narrow, hooded wagon, drawn by swaying oxen, known familiarly as a “prairie schooner,” in which he journeyed across the plains to California in ’53, did not help his conception by that nautical figure.  And when at last he dropped upon the land of promise through one of the Southern mountain passes he halted all unconsciously upon the low banks of a great yellow river amidst a tangled brake of strange, reed-like grasses that were unknown to him.  The river, broadening as it debouched through many channels into a lordly bay, seemed to him the ultima thule of his journeyings.  Unyoking his oxen on the edge of the luxuriant meadows which blended with scarcely any line of demarcation into the great stream itself, he found the prospect “good” according to his lights and prairial experiences, and, converting his halted wagon into a temporary cabin, he resolved to rest here and “settle.”