California became suddenly a radiant vision. No longer a
faint line of color, vaguely lovely, but a place where fortune waited
them, gold to fill their coffers, to bring them ease, to give their
aspirations definite shape, to repay them for their bitter pilgrimage.
They were seized with the lust of it, and their attentive faces
sharpened with the strain of the growing desire. They felt the onward
urge to be up and moving, to get there and lay their hands on the
waiting treasure.
The night grew old and still they talked, their fatigue forgotten.
They heard the tale of Marshall's discovery and how it flew right and
left through the spacious, idle land. There were few to answer the
call, ranches scattered wide over the unpeopled valleys, small traders
in the little towns along the coast. In the settlement of Yerba Buena,
fringing the edge of San Francisco Bay, men were leaving their goods at
their shop doors and going inland. Ships were lying idle in the tide
water, every sailor gone to find the golden river. The fair-haired man
laughed and told how he'd swam naked in the darkness, his money in his
mouth, and crawled up the long, shoal shore, waist high in mud.
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