“You see,” the young man continued cheerfully, “I’m loose now on about seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. Time was up in fact day before yesterday, and I’ve been wondering some what they are going to do to my bondsmen. Well, we’ll find out at Ogden when we get the coast papers.” And when they reached Ogden Brainard ventured to inquire, seeing his new acquaintance deep in the folds of a San Francisco newspaper,—“Well, what did they do to those bondsmen?” “Nothing yet, so far as I can see. Oh, hell, it’s all bluff anyway!” and he dropped his newspaper out of the open window. . . . A man of such cheerful and frank presence, who read _Paradise Lost_ (with the aid of a dictionary) and traveled to New York on seventy-five thousand dollars of bail bonds was a curiosity to Brainard. He very much wished to ask him a few impertinent questions in order to satisfy his curiosity, but could not summon sufficient courage, though he felt sure that the agreeable stranger would cheerfully enlighten him. V As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in close conversation with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden. He had already noted this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever toilet articles the traveler carried were carefully concealed. Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the center of a little group of men at one of the card tables,—a bottle of beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He was conversing with that perfect naturalness and freedom that Brainard had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete strangers. “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from Alaska in 1907 broke,—that is, what you might call broke,—a couple of thousand dollars all I had in the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done with mines! For good. I’ve spent the better part of thirty years chasing gold, and there may be money to be got out of the ground, but it ain’t for me.’ And would you believe it? The next morning I was starting for Union! Met a man I knew at the hotel in Seattle and he showed me some samples of the ore they were taking out there. And I started. The old woman too. Been there ever since!” He paused as if to let the others say “Kismet!” and repeated,—“Been there ever since, working the next claim. My wife died six months ago, and I got lonely and thought I’d come out and see what had happened to Frisco since the quake.”