A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready | Page 6

Ramon, and actually offered to purchase the land, or "go

shares" with him in the agricultural profits. It was alleged that the Don
was so struck with this concession that he not only granted the land, but
struck up a quaint reserved friendship for the simple-minded
agriculturist and his family. It is scarcely necessary to add that this
intimacy was viewed by the miners with the contempt that it deserved.
They would have been more contemptuous, however, had they known
the opinion that Don Ramon entertained of their particular vocation,
and which he early confided to Mulrady.
"They are savages who expect to reap where they have not sown; to
take out of the earth without returning anything to it but their precious
carcasses; heathens, who worship the mere stones they dig up." "And
was there no Spaniard who ever dug gold?" asked Mulrady, simply.
"Ah, there are Spaniards and Moors," responded Don Ramon,
sententiously. "Gold has been dug, and by caballeros; but no good ever
came of it. There were Alvarados in Sonora, look you, who had mines
of SILVER, and worked them with peons and mules, and lost their
money--a gold mine to work a silver one--like gentlemen! But this
grubbing in the dirt with one's fingers, that a little gold may stick to
them, is not for caballeros. And then, one says nothing of the curse."
"The curse!" echoed Mary Mulrady, with youthful feminine
superstition. "What is that?"
"You knew not, friend Mulrady, that when these lands were given to
my ancestors by Charles V., the Bishop of Monterey laid a curse upon
any who should desecrate them. Good! Let us see! Of the three
Americanos who founded yonder town, one was shot, another died of a
fever--poisoned, you understand, by the soil--and the last got himself
crazy of aguardiente. Even the scientifico,* who came here years ago
and spied into the trees and the herbs: he was afterwards punished for
his profanation, and died of an accident in other lands. But," added Don
Ramon, with grave courtesy, "this touches not yourself. Through me,
YOU are of the soil."
* Don Ramon probably alluded to the eminent naturalist Douglas, who
visited California before the gold excitement, and died of an accident in
the Sandwich Islands.

Indeed, it would seem as if a secure if not a rapid prosperity was the
result of Don Ramon's manorial patronage. The potato patch and
market garden flourished exceedingly; the rich soil responded with
magnificent vagaries of growth; the even sunshine set the seasons at
defiance with extraordinary and premature crops. The salt pork and
biscuit consuming settlers did not allow their contempt of Mulrady's
occupation to prevent their profiting by this opportunity for changing
their diet. The gold they had taken from the soil presently began to flow
into his pockets in exchange for his more modest treasures. The little
cabin, which barely sheltered his family--a wife, son, and
daughter--was enlarged, extended, and refitted, but in turn abandoned
for a more pretentious house on the opposite hill. A whitewashed fence
replaced the rudely-split rails, which had kept out the wilderness. By
degrees, the first evidences of cultivation--the gashes of red soil, the
piles of brush and undergrowth, the bared boulders, and heaps of
stone-- melted away, and were lost under a carpet of lighter green,
which made an oasis in the tawny desert of wild oats on the hillside.
Water was the only free boon denied this Garden of Eden; what was
necessary for irrigation had to be brought from a mining ditch at great
expense, and was of insufficient quantity. In this emergency Mulrady
thought of sinking an artesian well on the sunny slope beside his house;
not, however, without serious consultation and much objection from his
Spanish patron. With great austerity Don Ramon pointed out that this
trifling with the entrails of the earth was not only an indignity to Nature
almost equal to shaft-sinking and tunneling, but was a disturbance of
vested interests. "I and my fathers, San Diego rest them!" said Don
Ramon, crossing himself, "were content with wells and cisterns, filled
by Heaven at its appointed seasons; the cattle, dumb brutes though they
were, knew where to find water when they wanted it. But thou sayest
truly," he added, with a sigh, "that was before streams and rain were
choked with hellish engines, and poisoned with their spume. Go on,
friend Mulrady, dig and bore if thou wilt, but in a seemly fashion, and
not with impious earthquakes of devilish gunpowder."
With this concession Alvin Mulrady began to sink his first artesian
shaft. Being debarred the auxiliaries of steam and gunpowder, the work
went on slowly. The market garden did not suffer meantime, as

Mulrady had employed two Chinamen to take charge of the ruder
tillage, while he superintended