it a
name, and let's go and have a drink on this. We can't all find the big
nuggets, old hoss; and if I'm in luck, don't be hard on yer mate."

Then he held out his fist, but I couldn't take it, but turning off, I
ran hard down among the rocks till I dropped, bruised and bleeding, and
didn't go back to my tent that night.

I got a bit wild arter that. Hez and Jael were spliced up, and I allus
kep away. When I wanted an ounce or two of gold, I worked, and when I'd
got it, I used to drink--drink, because I wanted to drown all
recollection of the past.

Hez used to come to me, but I warned him off. Last time he come across
me, and tried to make friends, "Hez," I says, "keep away--I'm desprit
like--and I won't say I shan't plug yer!"

Then Jael came, and she began to talk to me about forgiving him; but it
only made me more mad nor ever, and so I went and pitched at the lower
end of the Gulch, and they lived at t'other.

Times and times I've felt as if I'd go and plug Hez on the quiet, but I
never did, though I got to hate him more and more, and never half so
much as I did nigh two years arter, when I came upon him one day sudden
with his wife Jael, looking pootier than ever, with a little
white-haired squealer on her arm. An' it ryled me above a bit, to see
him so smiling and happy, and me turned into a bloodshot, drinking,
raving savage, that half the Gulch was feared on, and t'other half
daren't face.

I had been drinking hard--fiery Bourbon, you bet!--for about a week,
when early one morning, as I lay in my ragged bit of a tent, I woke up,
sudden-like, to a roarin' noise like thunder; and then there came a
whirl and a rush, and I was swimmin' for life, half choked with the
water that had carried me off. Now it was hitting my head, playful
like, agen the hardest corners of the rock it could find in the Gulch;
then it was hitting me in the back, or pounding me in the front with
trunks of trees swept down from the mountains, for something had bust--a
lake, or something high up--and in about a wink the hull settlement in
Yaller Gulch was swep' away.

"Wall," I says, getting hold of a branch, and drawing myself out, "some
on 'em wanted a good wash, and this 'll give it 'em;" for you see water
had been skeerce lately, and what there was had all been used for
cleaning the gold.

I sot on a bit o' rock, wringing that water out of my hair--leastwise,
no: it was someone else like who sot there, chap's I knowed, yo