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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
CHAPTER III. GOG OF GRIM GULCH. Cave quos Deus notavit. Gog Bradstow got his nickname thus: when he first appeared at Grim Gulch he wore spectacles, and so they called him Goggles. His object in so doing was to hide the recent loss of one of his eyes; but, after some successful gold-digging, he went to San Francisco and got a glass eye put in, and thenceforward gave up the spectacles. Thenceforward, also, his cronies gave up calling him Goggles, and abbreviated it to Gog. Although his true name was Job, Gog suited him better, for he was rather like that Guildhall giant. He was an immensely large fat flabby long-bodied short-necked man, with acunning leer on his face, and with a short allowance of fingers on both hands. This last peculiarity caused neither inquiry nor surprise at Grim Gulch; few of the diggers in that lucky spot were in a state of physical completeness, or could distinctly remember when they became incomplete. A man who had lost no more than an eye and a few fingers was rather objectionably like the inhabitants of the civilised world. Grim Gulch, when Gog Bradstow lived there, well deserved its name. Gulch appears to be one of those old English words which (like shunt, in the railway vocabulary) reappear just when wanted, after long desuetude. It is the same as gully, evidently; but gold-diggers have no time for dissyllables. Grim Gulch was the grimmest gully ever made by water; it was dry now, but its bottom was treacherous, and more than one digger had sunk in the bog, and been suffocated before his mates could help him ; its sides crumbled and fell in, and hadburied a whole gang of fellows who probably ought first to have been hanged. It was a dangerous digging, but very full of gold—so it attracted the most adventurous scoundrels in California. It ...