y
than before.

You see it was called the Forks simply because it was the Forks. In
California things name themselves, or rather Nature names them, and
that name is visibly written on the face of things, and every man may
understand who can read.

If they call a man Smith in that country it is simply because he looks
as if he ought to be called Smith--Smith, and nothing else.

Now there was Limber Tim, one of the first and best men of all the
thousand bearded and brawny set of Missourians, a nervous, weakly,
sensitive sort of a fellow, who kept always twisting his legs and arms
around as he walked, or talked, or tried to sit still, who never could
face anything or any one two minutes without flopping over, or turning
around, or twisting about, or trying to turn himself wrong side out, and
of course anybody instinctively knew his name as soon as he saw him.

The baptismal name of Limber Tim was Thomas Adolphus Grosvenor. And yet
these hairy, half-savage, unread Missourians, who had stopped here in
their great pilgrimage of the plains, and never yet seen a city, or the
sea, or a school-house, or a church, knew perfectly well that there was
a mistake in this matter the moment they saw him, and that his name was
Limber Tim.

It is pretty safe to say that if one of these wild and unread
Missourians had met this timid limber man meandering down the mountain
trail--met him, I mean, for the first time in all his life, without ever
having heard of him before--he would have gone straight up to him, taken
him by the hand, and shaking it heartily, said,

"How d'ye do, Limber Tim?"

The Forks had just been "struck." Some Missourians had slid into this
crack in the earth, had found the little streams full of gold, and
making sure that they had not been followed, and, like Indians,
obliterating all signs of their trail, they went out slily as they came,
struck the great stream of immigrants from the plains, and turned the
current of their friends from Pike into this crack of the earth till it
flowed full, and there was room for no more. The Forks was at once a
little Republic; a sort of San Marino without a patron saint or a single
tower.

A thousand men, I said, and not a single woman; that is, not one woman
who was what these men called "on the square." Of course, two or three
fallen women, soiled doves, had followed the fortunes of these hardy
fellows into the new camp, but they were in some respects worse than no
women