"Come ahead, Charley," bade his father. The dinner really was very good; and if anybody still was hungry, a sign on the cook's galley announced, invitingly: "Pies One Dollar." Charley saw several of the miners buying pies and eating them. When the Adams party came up on deck again, the _Mary Ann_ had passed Mare Island, where some vessels, among them two ships of war, were anchored, and was entering a narrow opening named the Straits of Carquinez. On the right the mountains approached very close. On the left appeared more shipping, and the houses and tents of a town. This was Benicia, and a prettily located place it was, too, with the ground sloping upward, behind it, and the massy brown crest of Mount Diablo, landmark seen from the Golden Gate, rising across the strait, before. Beyond Benicia the straits opened into Suisun Bay--a pocket into which emptied the Sacramento River and the San Joachin River. The San Joaquin River came in on the south. Anybody going to the southern gold mines would sail up the San Joachin to Stockton; but the _Mary Ann_ was bound for the Sacramento and the northern mines; so she kept on, through Suisun Bay, past a town of one house, on the south side, and named (people said, laughing) the New-York-of-the-Pacific, for the mouth of the Sacramento. XVII ON TO THE DIGGIN'S Suisun Bay was bordered with reedy marshes where the rushes grew higher than a man's head. It seemed to be a great hunting ground, for ducks, geese and swans flew in armies--a beautiful sight in the sunset. These quite excited the _Mary Ann's_ passengers, until suddenly somebody noted, distant in the east, ahead, a long broken line of bluish white. "Mountains!" "Look at the mountains, boys!" "No! Those are clouds." "No, siree! Mountains, with snow on 'em!" "Hooray for the Sierras, boys! There's where the gold lies." "See them?" bade Mr. Grigsby, to Charley and his father. "That's the main range of the Sierra Nevada--the Snowy Range, as the Spanish goes. It divides California from the Great Desert. Over it Carson led Fremont and us other fellows, in winter, through ten and twenty feet of snow, to the headwaters of the American River and down the American River to Sutter's Fort and the Sacramento. How far away is that range, do you think?" "Near a hundred miles, I should judge," calculated Mr. Adams. Various passengers were guessing twenty, fifty, one hundred and two hundred miles--making all kinds of wild assertions. But Charley's father had struck pretty accurately, for he had seen mountains before, in Mexico. "Just about," approved Mr. Grigsby. "The nearest perhaps seventy-five. But Sacramento's more than sixty miles yet, by the river, and the high Sierras are one hundred miles up the American from there."