Groups of men in red shirts and corded trousers tied at the knee, in high boots, sat round blazing fires, and talked of their prospects or discussed the news of the luck at other camps.

The sound of music came from two or three plank erections which rose conspicuously above the huts of the diggers, and were bright externally with the glories of white and colored paints.

To and from these men were always sauntering, and it needed not the clink of glasses and the sound of music to tell that they were the bars of the camp.
Here, standing at the counter, or seated at numerous small tables, men were drinking villainous liquor, smoking and talking, and paying but scant attention to the strains of the fiddle or the accordion, save when some well known air was played, when all would join in a boisterous chorus.

Some were always passing in or out of a door which led into a room behind.

Here there was comparative quiet, for men were gambling, and gambling high.
Going backwards and forwards with liquors into the gambling room of the Imperial Saloon, which stood just where Pine Tree Gulch opened into Yuba Valley, was a lad, whose appearance had earned for him the name of White Faced Dick.
White Faced Dick was not one of those who had done well at Pine Tree Gulch; he had come across the plains with his father, who had died when halfway over, and Dick had been thrown on the world to shift for himself.