He took a foolish satisfaction in not moving back from the river, with a faint hope that his ignoring of Captain Jack’s advice might mysteriously be conveyed to him.  He even thought of selling out his location and abandoning it, that he might escape the cold surveillance of his heartless friend.  All this was undoubtedly childish—­but there is an irrepressible simplicity of youth in all deep feeling, and the worldly inexperience of the frontiersman left him as innocent as a child.  In this phase of his unrequited affection he even went so far as to seek some news of Captain Jack at Sacramento, and, following out his foolish quest, even to take the steamboat from thence to Stockton.

What happened to him then was perhaps the common experience of such natures.  Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained for him utterly vanished.  He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and—­had he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary—­vulgar.  Rather, perhaps, it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and action of those who frequented it—­and for whom it was built—­were of a lower grade than his own.  And, strangely enough, this gave him none of his former sense of critical superiority, but only of his own utter and complete isolation.  He wandered in his rough frontiersman’s clothes from deck to cabin, from airy galleries to long saloons, alone, unchallenged, unrecognized, as if he were again haunting it only in spirit, as he had so often done in his dreams.

His presence on the fringe of some voluble crowd caused no interruption; to him their speech was almost foreign in its allusions to things he did not understand, or, worse, seemed inconsistent with their eagerness and excitement.  How different from all this were his old recollections of slowly oncoming teams, uplifted above the level horizon of the plains in his former wanderings; the few sauntering figures that met him as man to man, and exchanged the chronicle of the road; the record of Indian tracks; the finding of a spring; the discovery of pasturage, with the lazy, restful hospitality of the night!  And how fierce here this continual struggle for dominance and existence, even in this lull of passage.  For above all and through all he was conscious of the feverish haste of speed and exertion.

The boat trembled, vibrated, and shook with every stroke of the ponderous piston.  The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were all dominated, thrilled, and pulsating with the perpetual throb of the demon of hurry and unrest.  And when at last a horrible fascination dragged him into the engine room, and he saw the cruel relentless machinery at work, he seemed to recognize and understand some intelligent but pitiless Moloch, who was dragging this feverish world at its heels.