To and from these men were always sauntering,
and it needed not the clink of glasses and the sound of music to
tell that they were the bars of the camp.
Here, standing at the counter, or seated at numerous small tables,
men were drinking villainous liquor, smoking and talking, and paying
but scant attention to the strains of the fiddle or the accordion,
save when some well known air was played, when all would join in
a boisterous chorus. Some were always passing in or out of a door
which led into a room behind. Here there was comparative quiet,
for men were gambling, and gambling high.
Going backwards and forwards with liquors into the gambling room of
the Imperial Saloon, which stood just where Pine Tree Gulch opened
into Yuba Valley, was a lad, whose appearance had earned for him
the name of White Faced Dick.
White Faced Dick was not one of those who had done well at Pine
Tree Gulch; he had come across the plains with his father, who had
died when halfway over, and Dick had been thrown on the world to
shift for himself. Nature had not intended him for the work, for
he was a delicate, timid lad; what spirits he originally had having
been years before beaten out of him by a brutal father. So far,
indeed, Dick was the better rather than the worse for the event
which had left him an orphan.
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