chickens?" "No." "Any eggs?" "No." "What do you live on?"
"Nada" (nothing). The utter indifference of this boy, and the
tone of his answer "Nada," attracted the attention of Colonel
Mason, who had been listening to our conversation, and who
knew enough of Spanish to catch the meaning, and he exclaimed
with some feeling, "So we get nada for our breakfast." I felt
mortified, for I had held out the prospect of a splendid
breakfast of meat and tortillas with rice, chickens, eggs, etc., at
the ranch of my friend Josh Antonio, as a justification for
taking the Governor, a man of sixty years of age, more than
twenty miles at a full canter for his breakfast. But there was
no help for it, and we accordingly went a short distance to a
pond, where we unpacked our mules and made a slim breakfast; on
some scraps of hard bread and a bone of pork that remained in our
alforjas. This was no uncommon thing in those days, when many
a ranchero with his eleven leagues of land, his hundreds of
horses and thousands of cattle, would receive us with all the
grandiloquence of a Spanish lord, and confess that he had nothing
in his house to eat except the carcass of a beef hung up, from
which the stranger might cut and cook, without money or price, what
he needed. That night we slept on Salinas Plain, and the next
morning reached Monterey. All the missions and houses at that
period were alive with fleas, which the natives looked on as
pleasant titillators, but they so tortured me that I always gave
them a wide berth, and slept on a saddle-blanket, with the saddle
for a pillow and the serape, or blanket, for a cover. We never
feared rain except in winter. As the spring and summer of 1848
advanced, the reports came faster and faster from the gold-mines at
Sutter's saw-mill. Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and
spread throughout the land. Everybody was talking of "Gold!