errogate us according to an invariable formula. We must have
presented a comical sight--I with my great bulk and round, fresh face
alongside the solemn, lank, and leathery Yank; both of us drawn up at
attention, and solemn as prairie dogs.

"How much is one twentieth of two thousand thousand?" inquired Johnny.

"One hundred thousand," Yank and I chorused.

"Is that a plutocrat?" demanded Johnny cryptically.

"It is!" we cried.

Our sense of our own financial importance being thus refreshed, we
advanced in rigid military formation to the bar and took our drinks. Two
million dollars was the amount we had chosen as representing the value
of Our Interests. In deciding upon this figure we considered ourselves
very moderate in refusing to add probable future increment. It might
also be added that we equally neglected to deduct present liabilities.
Nobody ever guessed what this mysterious performance of ours meant, but
every one came to expect it and to be amused by it. In a mild way we and
our fool monkeyshines came to be a well-known institution.

Having nothing else to do, we entered heartily into the life and
pleasures of the place, and we met many of the leading citizens. Some of
them have since become historical personages. Talbot was hand in glove
with most of them, and in and out of dozens of their schemes. There was
David Broderick, a secretive, dignified, square-cut, bulldog sort of a
man, just making his beginning in a career that was to go far. I
remember he was then principally engaged in manufacturing gold coins and
slugs and buying real estate.[A] His great political rival, Dr. Gwin the
Southerner, I also met; and Talbot H. Green, then and for some time
later, one of the most liked and respected of men, but whose private
scandal followed him from the East and ruined him; and Sam Brannan, of
course, the ex-elder of the Mormons; and Jim Reckett, the gambler; and
W. T. Coleman, later known as Old Vigilante, and a hundred others. These
were strong, forceful men, and their company was always interesting.
They had ideas on all current topics, and they did not hesitate to
express those ideas. We thus learned something of the community in which
we had been living so long.

We heard of the political difficulties attendant on the jumble of
military and unauthorized civil rule; of the convention at Monterey in
September, with its bitterly contested boundary disputes; of the great
and mooted question as to whether Ca