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He called himself Pentecost, which was as near his right name as is usual with miners, and the boys dubbed his shop "Pentecost Chapel" at once. The name, somehow, reached the East, for within a few months there reached the post-office at Hanney's a document addressed to "Preacher in charge of Pentecost Chapel."
Self-sacrificing souls gave up home and friends, and hurried across, overland, to brave the Pacific and bury themselves among the Australasian savages. But, though they all passed in sight of Hanney's, none of them paused to give any attention to the souls who had flocked there.
Hanney's had been fairly excited for a week, for the Judge had arrived the week before, and his points had been carefully scrutinized and weighed, time and again, by every man in the camp.
At any rate, the missionaries let Hanney's alone. If he has several dozens of similarly constituted friends, they can all find similar locations by betaking themselves to any mining camp in the West. As Hanney's had no preacher, it will be readily imagined it had no church. With the first crowd who located there came an insolvent rumseller from the East.
But at the time of which this story treats a missionary would have fared even worse, for the boys where wholly absorbed by a very unrighteous, but still very darling, pleasure. A pair of veteran knifeists, who had fought each other at sight for almost ten years every time they met, had again found themselves in the same settlement, and Hanney's had the honor to be that particular settlement.
Hanney's Diggings certainly needed a missionary, if any place ever did; but, as one of the boys once remarked during a great lack of water, "It had to keep on a-needin'." Zealous men came up by steamer via the Isthmus, and seemed to consume with their fiery haste to get on board the vessel for China and Japan, and carry the glad tidings to the heathen.
But a few months thereafter there did appear at Hanney's a thin-chested, large-headed youth, with a heavily loaded mule, who announced himself as duly accredited by the aforementioned society to preach the Gospel among the miners. The boys received him cordially, and Pentecost offered him the nightly hospitality of curling up to sleep in front of the bar-room fireplace.
Bets were roared back and forth, and when Pentecost, by virtue of his universally conceded authority, commanded silence, there was a great deal of finger-telegraphy across the circle, and head-shaking in return. Such exquisite carving had never before been seen at Hanney's that was freely admitted by all.
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