a good deal about "race." Two things, however, concerned him: he was not
in looks certainly like any type of modern Englishman as seen either
on the stage in San Francisco, or as an actual tourist in the mining
regions, and his accent was undoubtedly Southwestern. He was tall and
dark, with deep-set eyes in a singularly immobile countenance; he had
an erect but lithe and sinewy figure even for his thirty odd years,
and might easily have been taken for any other American except for the
single exception that his nose was distinctly Roman, and gave him a
distinguished air. There was a suggestion of Abraham Lincoln (and even
of Don Quixote) in his tall, melancholy figure and length of limb, but
nothing whatever that suggested an Englishman.

It was shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident
occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his
mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years
an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits
contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her
widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough and
Ready; but it was a secret reproach hinted at in Atherly, although
it was known that the rich Peter Atherly kept his mother liberally
supplied, and that both he and his sister "Jinny" or Jenny Atherly
visited her frequently. One day he was telegraphed for, and on going to
the asylum found Mrs. Atherly delirious and raving. Through her son's
liberality she had bribed an attendant, and was fast succumbing to a
private debauch. In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter
by name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his "high
connections"--alluded to himself and his sister as being of the
"true breed"--and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the
familiarity of the camp during the days when she was known as "Old Ma'am
Atherly" or "Aunt Sally," declared that they were "no corn-cracking