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Updated: May 15, 2025
Above the iron-trap doors Po Lun waited patiently. In an unlighted alley back of the American Exchange Hotel two figures waited, as if by appointment on the night of March 14. One was Ashbury Harpending, a young Southerner, and one of the Committee of Thirty which, several years before, had hatched an unsuccessful plot to capture California for the hosts of slavery.
He turned to Harpending and Dore. "I'll have yours ready in a minute." Once more he vanished within. Robert picked up the bag allotted to him. It was very heavy. As he lifted it to his shoulder, the contents clinked. "Gold coin," said his father, significantly. "What if we're caught?" asked the boy, half fearfully. Ralston, reappearing, heard the question. "You won't be," he said.
Presently he went into the stock exchange, almost deserted now, after the close of the morning session. O'Brien was there, smoking a long black cigar and chatting in his boisterous, confidential way with Asbury Harpending. The latter was babbling in real estate. "Hullo, Windham!" he greeted. "You don't look very fit.... Been ill?" "Yes," Benito told him. "Laid up since the last of May.
"Quite right," returned Harpending. "That's where you come in, Benito. We want you to draw us a bill and lobby it through the Legislature...." "The thing is to make it a law. Then the Governor must appoint a commission. The Latham and Parrott properties will be condemned and we can acquire them at a fair price." "Very well," Benito answered. "It's a go."
He writes for the Carson Appeal under the name of Mark Twain." Benito, that afternoon, was closeted with Harpending and Ralston in the Bank of California. The financier, who was backing the Montgomery street venture, regarded Harpending a trifle quizzically. "Once," he said, "you tried to be a pirate, Asbury.... Oh, no offense," he laid a soothing hand upon the other's knee.
There we'll dress the Chapman into fighting trim, set up our guns aboard and capture the first Pacific Mail liner with gold out of California." "You're a clever fellow, Harpending. How'd you get those guns aboard without suspicion?" "Through a Mexican friend," replied Harpending. "He said he needed them to protect his mine in South America.
Harpending he knew and liked, despite his Southern sympathies; Rubery he had met; an English lad, high-spirited and well connected. In fact, John Bright soon had his errant nephew out of jail. And when, a few months later, Harpending and Greathouse were released, Benito deemed the story happily ended. He heard nothing from McTurpin. No doubt the fellow was dead.
Ralston had been euchered out of a railroad to Eureka, planned by Harpending and himself and opposed by the Big Four; "Montgomery to the Bay" was meeting with a host of difficulties; the Grand Hotel was building and Kearny street, where he owned property, was being widened. Ralston's genial countenance showed sometimes a little strained pucker between the eyes.
The other was an English boy named Alfred Rubery, large, good-looking, adventurous, nephew of the great London publicist, John Bright. It was he who spoke first in a guarded undertone: "Is everything ready safe?" "Far as I can tell," responded Harpending. "How many men d'you get?" asked Rubery. "Twenty ... that's enough. We'll pick up more at Manzanillo.
Madness and folly seem to have ruled the half-hearted conspirators of California. An ALABAMA or two on the Pacific would have been most destructive scourges of the sea. The last days of opportunity glide by. The prosaic records of the Federal Court in California tell of the evanescent fame of Harpending, Greathouse, Rubery, Mason, Kent, and the other would-be buccaneers.
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