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Updated: June 28, 2025
Gerald was not particularly romantic, but the idea of this fair young Spaniard, owner of one of the finest ranches in Yuba County, unmarried, and handsome too, if she were anything like her mother, inflamed his imagination a little. He shook hands cordially with the young man as he rose to go, and could not help wishing they were better acquainted.
It touched the lonely figure in the chair with an infinite compassion, and seemed to baptize with a shining flood the lowly head of the woman whose hair, as in the sweet old story, bathed the feet of him she loved. It even lent a kindly poetry to the rugged outline of Yuba Bill, half-reclining on his elbow between them and his passengers, with savagely patient eyes keeping watch and ward.
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.
They wandered into the vales of Napa and Sonoma, fancying them a fairyland. The sparkling waters of the American, the Sacramento, the Yuba, Feather, and Bear rivers are dancing silently over rift and ripple. There precious nuggets await the frenzied seekers for wealth. There are no gold-hunters yet in the gorges of these crystal streams.
"It belongs to that man whose seat you've got," said Yuba Bill, who, for insulting purposes of his own, preferred to establish the fiction that Wiles was an interloper; "and ef he reckons, in a sorter mixed kempeny like this, to lock up his portmantle, I don't know who's business it is. Who?" continued Bill, lashing himself into a simulated rage, "who, in blank, is running this yer team? Hey?
Then there was a lull, and in the midst of it Yuba Bill, driver of the "Pioneer" coach, quietly and coolly, impervious in waterproof, walked into the hall, entered the bar-room, took a candle, and, going behind the bar, selected a bottle, critically examined it, and, returning, poured out a quantity of whiskey in a glass and gulped it in a single draught.
"Won't you stop and rest with us?" said Joe politely. "I reckon I will," said the Pike man, getting off his beast. "You don't happen to have a bottle of whisky with you, strangers?" "No," said Joe. The newcomer looked disappointed. "I wish you had," said he. "I feel as dry as a tinder-box. Where might you be travelin'?" "We are bound for the mines on the Yuba River." "That's a long way off."
This was high and dry enough to be above the highest floods of Yuba, Sacramento or San Joaquin, but all business except the saloons was dull. Fronting on Portsmouth Square was the Hall of Corruption. Inside was a magnificently furnished bar, more than one keeper and various gambling tables, most of them with soiled doves in attendance.
A plank was put across the supports of the bridge over the Yuba, and a rope fastened to a beam overhead. Juanita went calmly to her death. She wore a Panama hat, and after mounting the platform she removed it, tossed it to a friend in the crowd, whose nickname was "Oregon," with the remark, "Adios amigo."
When your hoary-headed ole grandfather, or, to speak plainer, that partikler old whiskey-soaker known as Yuba Bill, wot sits on this box," he continued, with a diabolical wink at the Expressman, "waltzes in to pervide for a young couple jest startin' in life, thar's nothin' mean about his style, you bet. He fills the bill every time! Speshul Providences take a back seat when he's around."
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