The men of Rattlesnake gasped for breath.
It was Bulger! But Briggs quickly recovered himself.

"By what name," said he, turning passionately towards his guide, "does this man--this impostor--call himself here ?" "Baker." "Baker ?" echoed the Rattlesnake contingent.
"Baker ?" repeated Lance Forester, with a ghastly smile.
"Yes," returned their guide.

"You oughter know it too! For he sent his wife and daughters over, after his usual style, to sample your camp, a week ago! Come, now, what are you givin' us ?" IN THE TULES He had never seen a steamboat in his life.

Born and reared in one of the Western Territories, far from a navigable river, he had only known the "dugout" or canoe as a means of conveyance across the scant streams whose fordable waters made even those scarcely a necessity.

The long, narrow, hooded wagon, drawn by swaying oxen, known familiarly as a "prairie schooner," in which he journeyed across the plains to California in '53, did not help his conception by that nautical figure.
And when at last he dropped upon the land of promise through one of the Southern mountain passes he halted all unconsciously upon the low banks of a great yellow river amidst a tangled brake of strange, reed-like grasses that were unknown to him.