“But how does he know when to get out?”

“Well, when he bangs his head on the overbrace of the first flume, he knows he’s home and crawls out.”  Bob began gently to withdraw his arms.

If you let me go now,” she whispered, “I’ll wish that it had been a grizzley.”

“I must take you home.”

’Oh, you have!  I am home,” clinging to him desperately, “I want no other in the world than this one.”

“But my scarred — "

The girl reached up, drawing down his tall, dark head in her arms.  She kissed his mutilated cheek, then pressed it tenderly against her soft, bare throat.  It did not stay long, as Bob felt that such kisess should be returned without delay.

“Hu-ray,” cheered Solly Jake, waving his whisky jug, “tale ended right!  Time f’r ’nother drink, boys!” and standing up to his middle in water he proceeded to demonstrate his idea.

Curley Coppers the Jack

VII

“On Selby Flat we live in style;
We’ll stay right here till we make our pile. 
We’re sure to do it after a while,
Then good-bye to Californy!”

-Canfield’s “Diary of a Forty-Niner.”

The beautiful Casino at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth.  Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions.  It has become an institution through the years.  Time has brought it stability.

Its absolute antithesis were the gambling dens of ’49.  Built over-night, destined to remain if the mines were rich, and to melt away if they pinched out, the gambling hells were sometimes the veriest makeshifts.  Canvas covered, dirt floored, except for the dancing platform, rough red-wood bar and tables; surrounded by all the sordidness of Hurdy Gurdy town in which fortunes, and reputations, and lives were bid, and shuffled, and lost, as indiscriminately as grains of dust blown into the ever-changing sea.

The thirst for gold is universal.  In those half-mad days of delirious seeking, the princeling rubbed sleeves with the scoundrel and the clod, and each man’s ability was his only protection.  Fortune played no favorites.  The tale is told of the judge who drove home in his coach through a shallow creek.  Ruin faced him for the lack of a few thousand dollars.  He took out his derringer and shot himself.

Not half an hour later a Chinaman crossed the creek under his pole between two swinging baskets.  He found a nugget there which brought him over $30,000.

This, then, is the tale of what Fortune did to Curly Gillmore.

* * * * *

“Whoop-ee!  Ki-yi-ee hick-ee!  Yi-ee-ee!”

“There comes Curly,” said Teddy Karns,” never altering the steady flow of the whiskey he was pouring into a tin cup for Sailor Jack to drink.