you are
strong again, I say--and HE says--keep back farther from the river."

And that was all he knew. For even the nurse who attended him through
the first days of his brief convalescence would tell him nothing more.
He quickly got rid of her and resumed his work, for a new and strange
phase of his simple, childish affection for his benefactor, partly
superinduced by his illness, was affecting him. He was beginning to
feel the pain of an unequal friendship; he was dimly conscious that his
mysterious guest was only coldly returning his hospitality and benefits,
while holding aloof from any association with him--and indicating the
immeasurable distance that separated their future intercourse. He had
withheld any kind message or sympathetic greeting; he had kept back even
his NAME. The shy, proud, ignorant heart of the frontiersman swelled
beneath the fancied slight, which left him helpless alike of reproach
or resentment. He could not return the horses, although in a fit of
childish indignation he had resolved not to use them; he could not
reimburse him for the doctor's bill, although he had sent away the
nurse.

He took a foolish satisfaction in not moving back from the river, with a
faint hope that his ignoring of Captain Jack's advice might mysteriously
be conveyed to him. He even thought of selling out his location and
abandoning it, that he might escape the cold surveillance of his
heartless friend. All this was undoubtedly childish--but there is an
irrepressible simplicity of youth in all deep feeling, and the worldly
inexperience of the frontiersman left him as innocent as a child. In
this phase of his unrequited affection he even went so far as to seek
some news of Captain Jack at Sacramento, and, following out his foolish
quest, even to take the steamboat from thence to Stockton.

What happened to him then was perhaps the common experience of such
natures. Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained
for him utterly vanished. He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and--had
he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary--VULGAR.
Rather, perhaps, it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and
action of those who frequented it--and for whom it was built--were of a
lower grade than his own. And, strangely enough, this gave him none of
his former sense of critical superiority, but only of his own utter and
complete isolation. He wandered in his rough frontiersman's clothes from