Hanney\'s Diggings certainly needed a missionary, if any place ever did; but, as one of the boys once remarked during a great lack of water, "It had to keep on a-needin\'." Zealous men came up by steamer via the Isthmus, and seemed to consume with their fiery haste to get on board the vessel for China and Japan, and carry the glad tidings to the heathen. Self-sacrificing souls gave up home and friends, and hurried across, overland, to brave the Pacific and bury themselves among the Australasian savages. But, though they all passed in sight of Hanney\'s, none of them paused to give any attention to the souls who had flocked there. Men came out from \'Frisco and the East to labor with the Chinese miners, who were the only peaceable and well-behaved people in the mines; but the white-faced, good-natured, hard-swearing, generous, heavy-drinking, enthusiastic, murderous Anglo-Saxons they let severely alone. Perhaps they thought that hearts in which the good seed had once been sown, but failed to come up into fruit, were barren soil; perhaps they thought it preferable to be killed and eaten by cannibals than to be tumbled into a gulch by a revolver-shot, while the shootist strolled calmly off in company with his approving conscience, never thinking to ascertain whether his bullet had completed the business, or whether a wounded man might not have to fight death and coyotes together.
At any rate, the missionaries let Hanney\'s alone. If any one with an unquenchable desire to carry the Word where it is utterly unknown, a digestion without fear, and a full-proof article of common sense (these last two requisites are absolute), should be looking for an eligible location, Hanney\'s is just the place for him, and he need give himself no trouble for fear some one would step in before him. If he has several dozens of similarly constituted friends, they can all find similar locations by betaking themselves to any mining camp in the West.
As Hanney\'s had no preacher, it will be readily imagined it had no church. With the first crowd who located there came an insolvent rumseller from the East. He called himself Pentecost, which was as near his right name as is usual with miners, and the boys dubbed his shop "Pentecost Chapel" at once. The name, somehow, reached the East, for within a few months there reached the post-office at Hanney\'s a document addressed to "Preacher in charge of Pentecost Chapel." The postmaster went up and down the brook in high spirits, and told the boys; they instantly dropped shovel and pan, formed line, and escorted the postmaster and document to the chapel. Pentecost acknowledged the joke, and stood treat for the crowd, after which he solemnly tore the wrapper, and disclosed the report of a certain missionary society. Modestly expressing his gratification at the honor, and his unworthiness of it, he moved that old Thompson, who had the loudest voice in the crowd, should read the report aloud, he, Pentecost, volunteering to furnish Thompson all necessary spirituous aid during the continuance of his task. Thompson promptly signified his acquiescence, cleared his throat with a glass of amber-colored liquid, and commenced, the boys meanwhile listening attentively, and commenting critically.
"Too much cussed heavenly twang," observed one, disapprovingly, as one letter largely composed of Scriptural extracts was read.
"Why the deuce didn\'t he shoot?" indignantly demanded another, as a tale of escape from heathen pursuers was read.
"Shot up wimmen in a derned dark room! Well, I\'ll be durned!" soliloquized a yellow-haired Missourian, as Thompson read an account of a Zenana. "Reckon they\'d set an infernal sight higher by wimmen if they wuz in the diggins\' six months—hey, fellers?"
"You bet!" emphatically responded a majority of those present.
Before the boys became very restive, Thompson finished the pamphlet, including a few lines on the cover, which stated that the society was greatly in need of funds, and that contributions might be sent to the society\'s financial agent in Boston. Thompson gracefully concluded his service by passing the hat, with the following net result: Two revolvers, one double-barreled pistol, three knives, one watch, two rings (both home-made, valuable and fearfully ugly), a pocket-inkstand, a silver tobacco-box, and forty or fifty ounces of dust and nuggets. Boston Bill, who was notoriously absent-minded, dropped in a pocket-comb, but, on being sternly called to order by old Thompson, cursed himself most fluently, and redeemed his disgraceful contribution with a gold double-eagle. "The Webfoot," who was the most unlucky man in camp, had been so wrought upon by the tale of one missionary who had lost his all many times in succession, sympathetically contributed his only shovel, for which act he was enthusiastically cursed and liberally treated at the bar, while the shovel was promptly sold at auction to the highest bidder, who presented it, with a staggering slap between the shoulders, to its original owner. The remaining non-legal tenders were then converted into gold-dust, and the whole dispatched by express, with a grim note from Pentecost, to the society\'s treasurer at Boston. As the society was controlled by a denomination which does not understand how good can come out of evil, no detail of this contribution ever appeared in print. But a few months thereafter there did appear at Hanney\'s a thin-chested, large-headed youth, with a heavily loaded mule, who announced himself as duly accredited by the aforementioned society to preach the Gospel among the miners. The boys received him cordially, and Pentecost offered him the nightly hospitality of curling up to sleep in front of the bar-room fireplace. His mule\'s load proved to consist largely of tracts, which he vigorously distributed, and which the boys used to wrap up dust in. He nearly starved while trying to learn to cook his own food, so some of the boys took him in and fed him. He tried to persuade the boys to stop drinking, and they good-naturedly laughed; but when he attempted to break up the "little game" which was the only amusement of the camp—the only steady amusement, for fights were short and irregular—the camp rose in its wrath, and the young man hastily rose and went for his mule.
But at the time of which this story treats a missionary would have fared even worse, for the boys where wholly absorbed by a very unrighteous, but still very darling, pleasure. A pair of veteran knifeists, who had fought each other at sight for almost ten years every time they met, had again found themselves in the same settlement, and Hanney\'s had the honor to be that particular settlement. "Judge" Briggs, one of the heroes, had many years before discussed with his neighbor, Billy Bent, the merits of two opposing brands of mining shovels. In the course of the chat they drank considerable villainous whisky, and naturally resorted to knives as final arguments. The matter might have ended here, had either gained a decided advantage over the other; but both were skillful—each inflicted and received so near the same number of wounds, that the wisest men in camp were unable to decide which whipped. Now, to average Californians in the mines this is a most distressing state of affairs; the spectators and friends of the combatants waste a great deal of time, liquor, and blood on the subject, while the combatants themselves feel unspeakably uneasy on the neutral ground between victory and defeat. At Sonora, where Billy and the Judge had their first encounter, there was no verdict, so the Judge indignantly shook the dust from his feet and went elsewhere. Soon Billy happened in at the same place, and a set-to occurred at sight, in which the average was no disarranged. Both men went about, for a month or two, in a patched-up condition, and then Billy roamed off, to be soon met by the Judge with the usual result. Both men were known by reputation all through the gold regions, and the advent of either at any "gulch," or "washin\'," was the best advertisement the saloon-keepers could desire. In the East, hundreds of men would have tried to reason the men out of this feud, and some few would have forcibly separated them while fighting; but in the diggings any interference in such matters is considered impertinent, and deserving of punishment.
Passing the hat.
Thompson gracefully concluded his service by
passing the hat.
Hanney\'s had been fairly excited for a week, for the Judge had arrived the week before, and his points had been carefully scrutinized and weighed, time and again, by every man in the camp. There seemed nothing unusual about him—he was of middle size, and long hair and beard, a not unpleasant expression, and very dirty clothes; he never jumped a claim, always took his whisky straight, played as fair a game of poker as the average of the boys, and never stole a mule from any one whiter than a Mexican. The boys had just about ascertained all this, and made their "blind" bets on the result of the next fight, when the whole camp was convulsed with the intelligence that Billy Bent had also arrived. Work immediately ceased, except in the immediate vicinity of the champions, and the boys stuck close to the chapel, that being the spot where the encounter should naturally take place. Miners thronged in from fifty miles around, and nothing but a special mule express saved the camp from the horror of Pentecost\'s bar being inadequate to the demand. Between "straight bets" and "hedging" most of the gold dust in camp had been "put up," for a bet is the only California backing of an opinion. As the men did not seem to seek each other, the boys had ample time to "grind things down to a pint," as the camp concisely expressed it, and the matter had given excuse for a dozen minor fights, when order was suddenly restored one afternoon by the entrance of Billy and his neighbors, just as the Judge and his neighbors were finishing a drink.
The boys immediately and silently formed a ring, on the outer edge of which were massed all the men who had been outside, and who came pouring in like flies before a shower. No one squatted or hugged the wall, for it ............