He
was engaged in all manner of speculative ventures on his own account, but
the special agent had so frequently employed him in "enterprises of great
pith and moment" that he was in a certain sense and to a certain extent
one of us. He seemed to me at the time unique, but shortly afterward I had
learned to classify him as a type of the Californian adventurer with whose
peculiarities of manner, speech and disposition most of us are to-day
familiar enough. He never spoke of his past, having doubtless good reasons
for reticence, but any one learned in Western slang--a knowledge then
denied me--would have catalogued him with infallible accuracy. He was a
rather large, strong fellow, swarthy, black-bearded, black-eyed,
black-hearted and entertaining, no end; ignorant with an ignorance whose
frankness redeemed it from offensiveness, vulgar with a vulgarity that
expressed itself in such metaphors and similes as would have made its
peace with the most implacable refinement. He drank hard, gambled high,
swore like a parrot, scoffed at everything, was openly and proudly a
rascal, did not know the meaning of fear, borrowed money abundantly, and
squandered it with royal disregard. Desiring one day to go to Mobile, but
reluctant to leave Montgomery and its pleasures--unwilling to quit
certainty for hope--he persuaded the captain of a loaded steamboat to wait
four days for him at an expense of $400 a day; and lest time should hang
too heavy on the obliging skipper's hands, Jack permitted him to share the
orgies gratis.
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