Maruja And Other Tales - 5 Author:Bret Harte Volume: 5 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin company Subjects: Western stories California Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Fiction / Westerns Fiction / Family Life Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrat... more »ions and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND Hakdly one of us, I think, really believed in the auriferous probabilities of Eureka Gulch. Following a little stream, we had one day drifted into it, very much as we imagined the river-gold might have done in remoter ages, with the difference that we remained there, while the river- gold to all appearances had not. At first it was tacitly agreed to ignore this fact, and we made the most of the charming locality, with its rare watercourse that lost itself in tangled depths of manzanita and alder, its laurel-choked pass, its flower-strewn hillside, and its summit crested with rocking pines. " You see," said the optimistic Rowley, " water 'a the main thing after all. If we happen to strike river-gold, thar's the stream for washing it; if we happen to drop into quartz -- and that thar rock looks mighty likely -- thar ain't a more natural-born site for a mill than that right bank, with water enough to run fifty stamps. That hillside is an original dump for your tailings, and a ready found inclined road for your trucks, fresh from the hands of Providence; and that road we 're kalkilatin' to build to the turnpike will run just easy along that ridge." Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained there, excusing our youthful laziness and incertitude by brilliant and effective sarcasms upon the unremunerative attract...« less