A 1 fool.”  It was Yuba Bill, also, after this speech, glared savagely around, walked down the crowded gang-plank with a rigid and aggressive shoulder, picked a quarrel with his cabman, and, after bundling that functionary into his own vehicle, took the reins himself, and drove furiously to his hotel.  “It cost me,” said Bill, recounting the occurrence somewhat later at Angel’s,—­“it cost me a matter o’ twenty dollars afore the jedge the next mornin’; but you kin bet high thet I taught them ’Frisco chaps suthin new about drivin’.  I didn’t make it lively in Montgomery Street for about ten minutes,—­O no!”

And so by degrees the two original locaters of the great Cinnabar lode faded from the memory of Angel’s, and Calaveras knew them no more.  In five years their very names had been forgotten; in seven the name of the town was changed; in ten the town itself was transported bodily to the hillside, and the chimney of the Union Smelting Works by night flickered like a corpse-light over the site of Johnson’s cabin, and by day poisoned the pure spices of the pines.  Even the Mansion House was dismantled, and the Wingdam stage deserted the highway for a shorter cut by Quicksilver City.  Only the bared crest of Deadwood Hill, as of old, sharply cut the clear blue sky, and at its base, as of old, the Stanislaus River, unwearied and unresting, babbled, whispered, and hurried away to the sea.

A midsummer’s day was breaking lazily on the Atlantic.  There was not wind enough to move the vapors in the foggy offing, but where the vague distance heaved against a violet sky there were dull red streaks that, growing brighter, presently painted out the stars.  Soon the brown rocks of Greyport appeared faintly suffused, and then the whole ashen line of dead coast was kindled, and the lighthouse beacons went out one by one.  And then a hundred sail, before invisible, started out of the vapory horizon, and pressed toward the shore.  It was morning, indeed, and some of the best society in Greyport, having been up all night, were thinking it was time to go to bed.

For as the sky flashed brighter it fired the clustering red roofs of a picturesque house by the sands that had all that night, from open lattice and illuminated balcony, given light and music to the shore.  It glittered on the broad crystal spaces of a great conservatory that looked upon an exquisite lawn, where all night long the blended odors of sea and shore had swooned under the summer moon.  But it wrought confusion among the colored lamps on the long veranda, and startled a group of ladies and gentlemen who had stepped from the drawing-room window to gaze upon it.  It was so searching and sincere in its way, that, as the carriage of the fairest Miss Gillyflower rolled away, that peerless young woman, catching sight of her face in the oval mirror, instantly pulled down the blinds, and, nestling the whitest shoulders in Greyport against the crimson cushions, went to sleep.