“It is only ginger!” said another scornfully.

“Mebbe it is, and mebbe it isn’t,” returned Cy Parker stoutly.  “Mebbe ut’s only my fancy.  But if it’s the sort o’ stuff to bring on that fancy, and that fancy cures me, it’s all the same.  I’ve got about two dollars’ worth o’ that fancy or that ginger, and I’m going to stick to it.  You hear me!” And he carefully put it back in his pocket.

At which criticisms and gibes broke forth.  If he (Cy Parker), a white man, was going to “demean himself” by consulting a Chinese quack, he’d better buy up a lot o’ idols and stand ’em up around his cabin.  If he had that sort o’ confidences with See Yup, he ought to go to work with him on his cheap tailings, and be fumigated all at the same time.  If he’d been smoking an opium pipe, instead of smelling punk, he ought to be man enough to confess it.  Yet it was noticeable that they were all very anxious to examine the packet again, but Cy Parker was alike indifferent to demand or entreaty.

A few days later I saw Abe Wynford, one of the party, coming out of See Yup’s wash-house.  He muttered something in passing about the infamous delay in sending home his washing, but did not linger long in conversation.  The next day I met another miner at the wash-house, but he lingered so long on some trifling details that I finally left him there alone with See Yup.  When I called upon Poker Jack of Shasta, there was a singular smell of incense in his cabin, which he attributed to the very resinous quality of the fir logs he was burning.  I did not attempt to probe these mysteries by any direct appeal to See Yup himself:  I respected his reticence; indeed, if I had not, I was quite satisfied that he would have lied to me.  Enough that his wash-house was well patronized, and he was decidedly “getting on.”

It might have been a month afterwards that Dr. Duchesne was setting a broken bone in the settlement, and after the operation was over, had strolled into the Palmetto Saloon.  He was an old army surgeon, much respected and loved in the district, although perhaps a little feared for the honest roughness and military precision of his speech.  After he had exchanged salutations with the miners in his usual hearty fashion, and accepted their invitation to drink, Cy Parker, with a certain affected carelessness which did not, however, conceal a singular hesitation in his speech, began:—­

“I’ve been wantin’ to ask ye a question, Doc,—­a sort o’ darned fool question, ye know,—­nothing in the way of consultation, don’t you see, though it’s kin er in the way o’ your purfeshun.  Sabe?”

“Go on, Cy,” said the doctor good-humoredly, “this is my dispensary hour.”

“Oh! it ain’t anything about symptoms, Doc, and there ain’t anything the matter with me.  It’s only just to ask ye if ye happened to know anything about the medical practice of these yer Chinamen?”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor bluntly, “and I don’t know anybody who does.”