Читать книгу Hard-Pan. A Story of Bonanza Fortunes онлайн

38 страница из 59

He shrugged his shoulders and flung out his hands with a gesture of hopeless acquiescence in unmerited bad luck.

“You’re fortunate,” said Gault, “to have something to be on the full jump about. We find things pretty slow.”

“Oh, of course, in comparison with the past,” assented the old man. “Slow? Slow is not the word. Dead, my dear friend! San Francisco is a dead city—dead as Pompeii.”

“Well, not quite as bad as that,” said Gault, laughing in spite of himself.

“How should you be able to judge?” retorted the colonel. “You weren’t thought of when we old fellows were laying out the town. There was more life here in a minute then than there is now in a week. Then Portsmouth Square was the plaza and the center of the city, with a line of French boot-blacks along the lower side. We used to try our French on ’em every time we got a shine. And Lord! what smart fellows they were, and how much money they made!”

“So I’ve heard,” murmured Gault.

“And when I think of this street later on, this street alone, in, say, ’70—how it boiled and bubbled and sizzled with life! Those were the days to live in!”