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For inhabitants, the camp has about two hundred miners, one white woman and child, several Chinese washermen, five squaws, and a dozen vagrant buck Indians in rabbit-skin robes, battered plug hats, and tin-can necklaces. There are no mills as yet; there is no church, no newspaper. The camp has existed but two years; it has made no big strike; the world is ignorant of its name and place.
The carriage consisted of two uprights on a base, with mortar between them and pointing up at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The charge was little packets of gunpowder tied up in paper in measured doses. The bomb was a tin-can an empty jam-tin, mostly filled with a bursting charge and fragments of metal, and with an inch or so of the fuse protruding.
Broken glass went into the refuse buckets, bent metal was buried in the garden, inflammables were incinerated, and meltables and fusibles slagged down in ashes that held glass, bottle, and empty tin-can in an unrecognizable mass. He left a gaping hole in the machine that Brennan could not fill nor could any living man fill it now but James Quincy Holden.
As Pete and Bill Shea and Tom Farmer threw the diamond hitch over the packs that morning, they explained to me that all camp cooks are of two kinds the good cooks, who are evil of disposition, and the tin-can cooks, who only need a can-opener to be happy. But I lived to be able to refute that. Norman Lee was a cook, and he was also amiable.
"He's been warn in' me, boys," he called. "That devil has the range like he was sitting in a rockin' chair shooting at a tin-can. He's warnin' us back to the rest of the gang. And damned if we ain't goin'!" It was quite patent that he was right, for three bullets sent on a line for one horse, and each of them closer, could mean only one thing.
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