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B. M. Bower
The Gringos
The Tale of the California Gold Rush Days
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-2061-8
Table of Contents
Chapter I. The Beginning of it
Chapter III. The Thing they Called Justice
Chapter IV. What Happened at the Oak
Chapter VII. The Lord of the Valley
Chapter VIII. Don Andres Wants a Majordomo
Chapter IX. Jerry Simpson, Squatter
Chapter X. The Finest Little Woman in the World
Chapter XIII. Bill Wilson Goes Visiting
Chapter XV. When Camp-Fires Blink
Chapter XVI. "For Weapons I Choose Riatas"
Chapter XVII. A Fiesta we Shall Have
Chapter XVIII. What is Love Worth?
Chapter XX. Lost! Two Hasty Tempers
Chapter XXII. The Battle of Beasts
Chapter XXIII. The Duel of Riatas
Chapter XXIV. For Love and a Medal
Chapter I. The Beginning of it
If you would glimpse the savage which normally lies asleep, thank God, in most of us, you have only to do this thing of which I shall tell you, and from some safe sanctuary where leaden couriers may not bear prematurely the tidings of man's debasement, watch the world below. You May See Civilization Swing Back With A Snap To Savagery And Worse—Because Savagery Enlightened By The Civilization Of Centuries Is A Deadly Thing To Let Loose Among Men. Our Savage Forebears Were But Superior Animals Groping Laboriously After Economic Security And A Social Condition That Would Yield Most Prolifically The Fruit Of All The World'S Desire, Happiness; To-Day, When We Swing Back To Something Akin To Savagery, We Do It For Lust Of Gain, Like Our Forebears, But We Do It Wittingly. So, If You Would Look Upon The Unlovely Spectacle Of Civilized Men Turned Savage, And See Them Toil Painfully Back To Lawful Living, You Have But To Do This:
Seek a spot remote from the great centers of our vaunted civilization, where Nature, in a wanton gold-revel of her own, has sprinkled her river beds with the shining dust, hidden it away under ledges, buried it in deep canyons in playful miserliness and salved with its potent glow the time-scars upon the cheeks of her gaunt mountains. You have but to find a tiny bit of Nature's gold, fling it in the face of civilization and raise the hunting cry. Then, from that safe sanctuary which you have chosen, you may look your fill upon the awakening of the primitive in man; see him throw off civilization as a sleeper flings aside the cloak that has covered him; watch the savages fight, whom your gold has conjured.
They will come, those savages; straight as the arrow flies they will come, though mountains and deserts and hurrying rivers bar their way. And the plodding, law-abiding citizens who kiss their wives and hold close their babies and fling hasty, comforting words over their shoulders to tottering old mothers when they go to answer the hunting call—they will be your savages when the gold lust grips them. And the towns they build of their greed will be but the nucleus of all the crime let loose upon the land. There will be men among your savages; men in whom the finer stuff outweighs the grossness and the greed. But to save their lives and that thing they prize more than life or gold, and call by the name of honor or friendship or justice—that thing which is the essence of all the fineness in their natures—to save that and their lives they also must fight, like savages who would destroy them.
There was a little, straggling hamlet born of the Mission which the padres founded among the sand hills beside a great, uneasy stretch of water which a dreamer might liken to a naughty child that had run away from its mother, the ocean, through a little gateway which the land left open by chance and was hiding there among the hills, listening to the calling
