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Occasionally his guardians heard from him At one ti ship that carried the English flag and coals from Newcastle They knew that much, because they had been called upon for the purchase price, because they read Dick's naers of the ill-fated Orion, and because they collected the insurance when Dick's ship was lost with reat Fiji hurricane In 1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was in Kamchatka and scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the Ah they could never learn how nor why, he ner andsince rejected by Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam

From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from him from various purple ports of the purple seas Once, they had to bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the chancellories of Europe

Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he pulled through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he stood trial for brutality on the high seas in New York City Thrice they read in the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle, in Mexico; and twice, executed, in Venezuela After such false flutterings, his guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he crossed the Yellow Sea in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of beri-beri, was captured from the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden, and endured military imprisonment in Japan

The one thrill of which they were still capable, hen, true to proe, his wild oats sown, he returned to California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been uardians found they knew Mr Slocu with the totality of her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver Mr Davidson had pulled awith her father when he pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in Amador County Mr Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant US Grant when all the little the western world knew of that young lieutenant was that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker player