freely of his former partner's promising future, and even read them
short extracts. It is needless to say that the camp did not accept Uncle
Billy's story with unsuspecting confidence. On the contrary, a hundred
surmises, humorous or serious, but always extravagant, were afloat in
Cedar Camp. The partners had quarreled over their clothes--Uncle Jim,
who was taller than Uncle Billy, had refused to wear his partner's
trousers. They had quarreled over cards--Uncle Jim had discovered that
Uncle Billy was in possession of a "cold deck," or marked pack. They had
quarreled over Uncle Billy's carelessness in grinding up half a box
of "bilious pills" in the morning's coffee. A gloomily imaginative
mule-driver had darkly suggested that, as no one had really seen Uncle
Jim leave the camp, he was still there, and his bones would yet be found
in one of the ditches; while a still more credulous miner averred that
what he had thought was the cry of a screech-owl the night previous to
Uncle Jim's disappearance, might have been the agonized utterance of
that murdered man. It was highly characteristic of that camp--and,
indeed, of others in California--that nobody, not even the ingenious
theorists themselves, believed their story, and that no one took the
slightest pains to verify or disprove it. Happily, Uncle Billy never
knew it, and moved all unconsciously in this atmosphere of burlesque
suspicion. And then a singular change took place in the attitude of the
camp towards him and the disrupted partnership. Hitherto, for no reason
whatever, all had agreed to put the blame upon Billy--possibly because
he was present to receive it. As days passed that slight reticence and
dejection in his manner, which they had at first attributed to remorse
and a guilty conscience, now began to tell as absurdly in his favor.
Here was poor Uncle Billy toiling though the ditches, while his selfish
partner was lolling in the lap of luxury in San Francisco! Uncle Billy's
glowing accounts of Uncle Jim's success only contributed to the sympathy
now fully given in his behalf and their execration of the absconding