The stranger had spoken of staying a week; he
had some private mining speculations to watch at Wynyard's Gulch,--the
next settlement, but he did not care to appear openly at the "Gulch
Hotel." He was a man of thirty, with soft, pleasing features and a
singular litheness of movement, which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy
complexion, at first suggested a foreigner. But his dialect, to the
colonel's ears, was distinctly that of New England, and to this was
added a puritanical and sanctimonious drawl. "He looked," said the
colonel in after years, "like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a
blank Yankee parson." For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who
may have felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James
River were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.
It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its future
fortunes. "Gentlemen having propahty interests at the Gulch, sah, prefer
to stay at Buena Vista with another man of propahty, than to trust to
those new-fangled papah-collared, gingerbread booths for traders that
they call 'hotels' there," he had remarked to some of "the boys.
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