But that friend is of sufficient importance to this veracious history to deserve a paragraph to himself.
The Pylades of this Orestes was known of ordinary mortals as Royal Thatcher.

His genealogy, birth, and education are, I take it, of little account to this chronicle, which is only concerned with his friendship for Biggs and the result thereof.

He had known Biggs a year or two previously; they had shared each other's purses, bunks, cabins, provisions, and often friends, with that perfect freedom from obligation which belonged to the pioneer life.

The varying tide of fortune had just then stranded Thatcher on a desert sand hill in San Francisco, with an uninsured cargo of Expectations, while to Thatcher's active but not curious fancy it had apparently lifted his friend's bark over the bar in the Monterey mountains into an open quicksilver sea.

So that he was considerably surprised on receiving a note from Biggs to this purport: "DEAR ROY--Run down here and help a fellow.