pasear
over the Pacific Railroad. At Pescadero the claim to being "the oldest inhabitant" is at issue between Don Salvador Mosquito, a Mission Indian, and Señor Don Felipe Armas, a Californian of Spanish parentage. Armas remembers that when King Kamehameha I., of Hawaii, found that the cattle which had grown up wild on his islands had become an unbearable nuisance, and sent over to this country for
vaqueros
to kill them off—a historical fact—he, Armas, was selected as one of the party. He was then said to be thirty-five years of age, but so many years have since elapsed that he "has lost the run of them entirely." The number of his immediate descendants is still increasing at the rate of one yearly. Salvador Mosquito was baptized under
another name, but the stout-built Mission in which the ceremony was performed has long since crumbled into dust, and the vaqueros, who, under the direction of the Holy Fathers (also dead), went out to lasso him and bring him in for the glory of God, have for many a year been hunting ethereal cattle on phantom steeds, over the ranchos of the blessed. I saw him the other day. He came down to the grocery to get a bottle of whisky, to which he is very partial when he cannot get milk, which is usually the case. This antidiluvian joker is always as dry as a fish. They trust him at the grocery until his bill amounts to two or three dollars, and then demand the coin. Lifting his hands, with the expression of a dying saint, the old rascal ejaculates, "
Yo muy pobre, señor! Yo tengo nada, nada, nada! señor!
" with solemn earnestness and every appearance of perfect honesty. But the clerk invariably goes for him in the most business-like manner. Placing his elbow against the venerable patriarch's windpipe, he pushes him back against the wall, and, bringing the pressure up to about the point of one hundred and sixty pounds to the square inch, gradually cuts off his supply of breath and consequent power of resistance; then running the other hand into his pocket produces a more or less well-filled purse, from which he repays the establishment and squares the account. Then Don Salvador denounces the act as a "damned Yankee trick," goes out in front of the store, spits in the dust, mixes up a little mud, in which he dips his finger, and making crosses and other cabalistic signs upon the door, and windows, and walls, calls down the
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
vengeance of an offended Heaven on the accursed tienda and everything therein. "May its walls fall out, its roof cave in, its contents be ground to powder, and its site be given over, as a last crowning curse, to the everlasting habitation and proprietorship of the worthy descendants of the chief robber, son of a priest and a woman without virtue, who now occupies it!" Then he goes home with a heart full of wrath and righteous bitterness. Next morning he returns to see the ruins, is duly astonished at seeing the place stand unharmed, goes in and commences a new account. Mosquito appears to be a man of strong but transitory prejudices. His tribe many years ago dwindled down to some forty or fifty, who, under the command of the chief, Pomponio, made their headquarters in the redwood forest above Pescadero, near to the source of the stream now bearing his name. From thence they made periodical forays on the ranchos below; but as the good Fathers had caught and "converted" all their female friends, they finally went down to the old Mission Santa Clara or San José—I am not certain which—and, breaking into the corral one night. carried off a "mahala" apiece from under the very noses of their pious guardians. For this daring act of sacrilege they were pursued by the Spanish soldiers to their mountain fastness and exterminated. Mosquito not being big enough for slaughter was not killed, but was caught and baptized. He is a buen Christiano, especially when about half-full of whisky. I have calculated the number of red peppers he must have eaten since that time, and the aggregate is something more bulky than Mount Diablo, and it would take more figures to express it than are required in the annual exhibit of our national debt.
"Pescadero" is the Spanish for "fishery," and the name is indicative. The creeks which come down from the mountains all alone: this coast swarm with the spotted trout of California, and afford fine sport in the early part of the season. In places along their banks, the honeysuckle bushes and other shrubs and vines form a chapparal so dense that you must wade for miles to whip the stream; but one hundred, two hundred, or even three hundred trout are often basketed in a single day's fishing by one individual. It does not rain here from April until the last of November or December; but as the days become shorter, and the sun's rays less powerful, the evaporation which caused the streams to dwindle to mere strings of detached ponds decreases, and all over the State, especially in the Coast Range, the rivers commence to rise. Thompson, a hospitable landlord, took me down to the mouth of the Pescadero for a little sport. We sent a Mexican after worms for bait. The Mexican sent a negro, and we sent a Chinaman after the negro, and got them all at last. The row down the creek was short. We saw hundreds of mallards and teal, which we could not shoot, because the law forbids it—very properly—until the 15th of the month, and large flocks of long-billed curlew and other birds, such as crows, buzzards, gulls, etc., etc., which we did not want to kill. There is a bar at the mouth of the creek, and we chained our boat to a high rock inside it and walked down to the ocean. The shores were lined with drift, trunks of great pine and redwood trees, timbers of wrecked ships, etc., etc., and the scenery was wildly romantic. We passed the festering carcasses of half a dozen great sea lions, which had been killed by a fishing party with Henry rifles some weeks before. The fish come into the creek with the tide, and bite best before the ebb commences. If the sea lions who cover the rocks just outside, follow them into the creek, the fish all run out—and there is no more sport that day. So the fishermen shoot some of the sea-lions to make the rest leave. Before we reached the mouth we saw two wolves on the opposite shore, running around by the edge of the breakers and playing like dogs. One ran off when he saw us, and the other lifted up his nose and voice, and treated us to the most vivid illustration imaginable of
"The wolfs lone howl on Onalaska's shore,"
and then followed his companion. As we rounded the bluff we saw some rocks just off shore covered with sea-lions. It was low tide, and we could run out to within fifty yards of them. I had a large-sized Smith & Wesson revolver, a capital weapon for such use, and as they threw up their heads to look at us, I sent a bullet into the side of a big spotted fellow who was lying high up and presented a good mark. The ball struck him with a dull thud, and as he rolled off into the waves the whole herd went splashing after him. Half a dozen of them swam down in a line to within twenty or thirty yards of us, and looked at us with their great lustrous brown eyes, whether in sorrow or in anger we could not tell, until I hit one on his head, and as the bullet glanced off, he disappeared with a grunt and porpoise-like plunge. Thompson took the pistol, and as one rose again fired and hit him squarely in the mouth. He shook his head from side to side, as if blind with pain, and then went down, leaving great dark spots in the water. They all started off then southward, and I was not sorry. Inveterate sportsman that I have been from my youth up, I cannot get over the feeling that the killing of defenseless creatures like these, and allowing their bodies to rot on the beach, is something akin to murder.
The rocks we stood on, and which are covered at high tide, were incrusted with mussels of immense size. Some of them measure twelve inches in length, and Thompson tells me that he has seen them fifteen inches long. They are fat and luscious, and a few epicures come down to the coast every season to indulge in clam-bakes and mussel-roasts; but this species of shell-fish is so common, and consequently cheap, that not one in ten of the people of California ever eat them. In holes in the rocks, filled with pure sea-water, we saw curious things like great sunflowers with bright-green petals. These we could not detach from the rocks, and at one touch they would curl up into a slippery ball with all the petals hidden inside.
We went back to our boat as the tide came