Coming back to Dupont street, I met a man whom I had last seen while on a hostile raid into the Hualapai Indian country, in Arizona, and our conversation, after the first greetings were over, turned upon one of the strange, peculiar characters with which the Pacific coast abounds—one we had both known—old "Concatenation Bill."
When and where he picked up the sobriquet, or it picked up him, we never knew; but, once attached to him, it became a part of his personality, and stuck to him thenceforth, through good report and through evil report, for the term of his natural life, and will be inscribed upon his tombstone, should fortune so far change her mood as to permit him to have one, which is a matter for doubt. It was doubtful if he knew himself. It was probably all he had to show for his months of labor in some early mining-camp, when he left it; and, as the camp itself is doubtless long since played out, and numbered with the things which have been, but are not, what matters it where it was located, or who toiled in it? In any event, it usurped the place of the name given him in baptism—if he ever was baptised—and, like most California nicknames, was appropriate.
"You are out of luck," said a rough-looking miner, to whom he had detailed his misfortunes, wanderings and misadventures for an hour.
"Out of luck! Well, I wish to Heaven I was; you may gamble on that; but I ain't. Why, God bless you, stranger, I'm just in a perfect streak of luck from morning to night, and from one year's end
