“Well,” sighed a discontented miner from New Jersey, “Providence knows His own bizness best, I s’pose; but I could have found him a feller that could have made a darn sight better use of his good luck—­ef he’d had any—­than Tom Chafflin. He don’t know nothin’ ’bout the worth of money—­never seed him drunk in my life, an’ he don’t seem to get no fun out of keerds.”

“Providence’ll hev a season’s job a-satisfyin’ you, old Redbank,” replied Cairo Jake; “but it’s all-fired queer, for all that.  Ef a feller could only learn how he done it, ’twouldn’t seem so funny; but he don’t seem to have no way in p’tickler about him that a feller ken find out.”

“Fact,” said Redbank, with a solemn groan.  “I’ve studied his face—­why, ef I’d studied half ez hard at school I’d be a president, or missionary, or somethin’ now—­but I don’t make it out.  Once I ’llowed ‘twas cos he didn’t keer, an’ was kind o’ reckless—­sort o’ went it blind.  So I tried it on a-playin’ monte.”

“Well, how did it work?” asked the gentleman from Cairo.

“Work?” echoed the Jerseyman, with the air of an unsuccessful candidate musing over the “saddest words of thought or pen;” “I started with thirteen ounces, an’ in twenty minutes I was borryin’ the price of a drink from the dealer. That’s how it worked.”

Certain other miners looked sorrowful; it was evident that they, too, had been reckless, and had trusted to luck, and that in a place where gold-digging and gambling were the only two means of proving the correctness of their theory, it was not difficult to imagine by which one they were disappointed.

“Long an’ short of it’s jest this,” resumed Cairo Jake, straightening himself for a moment, and picking some coarse gravel from his pan, “Tom Chafflin’s always in luck.  His claim pays better’n anybody else’s; he always gets the lucky number at a raffle, his shovel don’t never break, an’ his chimbly ain’t always catchin’ a-fire.  He’s gone down to ’Frisco now, an’ I’ll bet a dozen ounces that jest cos he’s aboard, the old boat’ll go down an’ back without runnin’ aground a solitary durned time.”

No one took up Cairo Jake’s bet, so that it was evident he uttered the general sentiment of the mining camp of Quicksilver Bar.

Every man, in the temporary silence which followed Jake’s summary, again bent industriously over his pan, until the scene suggested an amateur water-cure establishment returning thanks for basins of gruel, when suddenly the whole line was startled into suspension of labor by the appearance of London George, who was waving his hat with one hand and a red silk handkerchief with the other, while with his left foot he was performing certain pas not necessary to successful pedestrianism.

“Quicksilver Bar hain’t up to snuff—­oh, no!  Ain’t a-catchin’ up with Frisco—­not at all!  Little Chestnut don’t know how to run a saloon, an’ make other shops weep—­not in the least—­not at all—­oh, no!”