dead jump, yelling "murder" at the top of his lungs, and it was days before his nerves became quiet enough to enable him to mix a cocktail with anything like his accustomed skill and neatness.
Practical jokes were common in those days, and the jokers were by means fastidious as to the manner of playing them or their result. If life and limb were endangered, so much the better. I remember a man in Placerville, then called "Hangtown," from numerous little episodes in its history, which had resulted disastrously to parties involved in them, who owned a mule, which was admitted to be the champion animal for pure, unadulterated viciousness on the Pacific coast. He would start on the slightest hint. The rattle of a tin pan was poison to him; and in running away, he always made it a point to knock down and injure somebody. If he stampeded, and did not get a chance to kill or maim some one, he felt he had to account for a day wasted, and would stand for hours in deep dejection, his ears hanging down limp and lifeless; then suddenly rush across the street, whirl around and kick with all his might at a child or woman, by way of getting even and making up for lost time. It was a standing joke with the jolly boys of Hangtown to lend him to a party of newly arrived miners, to pack their traps to some placer mining-camp, and at the hour for starting gather in front of the express office to see him go off like a rocket, scatter everything right and left, and break for the chaparral, leaving the astonished gold-hunters to gather their traps and
