English fiction -- 19th century; Short stories, English
boys used to roll down and get full, and any that happened to be sober
rolled them up again when the time came to get. Some dropped into the
cañon that way--bad payers mostly. You see, a man held all the hill
Bow Flume was built on, and he wanted forty thousand dollars for a
forty-five by hundred lot o' ground. We kept the whisky and the boys
came down for it. The exercise disposed them to thirst. 'Boys,' says
O'Grady, 'as you know, I have visited the great metropolis of 'Frisco.'
Then they had drinks all round for 'Frisco. 'And I have been jailed a
few while enjoying the sights.' Then they had drinks all round for the
jail that held O'Grady. 'But,' he says, 'I have a proposal to make.'
More drinks on account of the proposal. 'I have got a hold of the idea
of those 'Frisco cable-cars. Some of the idea I got in 'Frisco. The
rest I have invented,' says O'Grady. Then they drank all round for the
invention.
"I am coming to the point. O'Grady made a company--the drunkest I ever
saw--to run a cable-car on the 'Frisco model from 'Wake Up an' Git
Saloon' to Bow Flume. The boys put in about four thousand dollars,
for Bow Flume was squirling gold then. There's nary shanty there now.
O'Grady put in four thousand dollars of his own, and I was roped in for
as much. O'Grady desired the concern to represent the resources of Bow
Flume. We got a car built in 'Frisco for two thousand dollars, with an
elegant bar at one end--nickel-plated fixings and ruby glass.
"The notion was to dispense liquor _en route_. A Bow Flume man could
put himself outside two drinks in a minute and a half, the same not
being pressed for urgent business. The boys graded the road for love,
and we run a rope in a little trough in the middle. That rope ran
swift, and any blame fool that had his foot cut off, fooling in the
middle of the road, might ha' found salvation by using our Bow Flume
Palace Car. The boys said that was square. O'Grady took the contract
for building the engine to wind the rope. He called his show a mule--it
was a crossbreed between a threshing machine and an elevator ram.
I don't think he had followed the 'Frisco patterns. He put all our
dollars into that blamed barroom on the car, knowing what would please
the boys best. They didn't care much about the machinery, so long as
the car hummed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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