On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was
presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the
engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most
pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished
dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a number of drinks and
cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing
Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging
one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.

Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout
victory crowned his arms.

At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.  Kelmar and his jolly
Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed
geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.  For three
people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so
venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and
almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.  They were only going to
stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles
of road before them on the other side?  Stay to dinner?  Not they!
Put up the horses? Never.  Let us attach them to the verandah by a
wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
that blustering day.  And with all these protestations of hurry,
they proved irresponsible like children.  Kelmar himself, shrewd
old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a
bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to
that boy.  Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter
a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread.  He
was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him
to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk.  If the boy said there was
"a hole there in the hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more
nor less--Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards
to look complacently down that hole.  For two hours we looked for
houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.  Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five
they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.

However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit
trees.  That was the site of Silverado mining town.  A piece of
ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing
that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the
legend Silverado Hotel.  Not another sign of habitation.  Silverado
town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now
the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there,
but all were gone away.

It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by
the great, vague voice of the wind.  Some days before our visit, a
grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.

Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.  Rufe had been out after a
"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither.  Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now
ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of
the mountain.  We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.  But this, somehow,
was not to Kelmar's fancy.  He first proposed that we should "camp
someveres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to
weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that
we must take up house with the Hansons.  Mrs. Hanson had been, from
the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this
proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.  So did we, who
would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.  But Kelmar
was not to be put by.  He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where
for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a
character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her
entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
still some houses at the tunnel.

Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into
Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.  For about a furlong
we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest,
until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.
A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here
walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and
from twenty to thirty feet in height.  A rusty iron chute on wooden
legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.
It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here
the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down
the mountain.

The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude
guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of
wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.  These led us round the
farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still
persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we
struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut
in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain.  Only in
front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we
looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and
hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.  The place
still stood as on the day it was deserted:  a line of iron rails
with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber,
old wood, old iron; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried
in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
wooden house.

Fanny and I dashed at the house.  It consisted of three rooms, and
was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of
another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a
different side and level.  Not a window-sash remained.

The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in
splinters.  We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish:
sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack
on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their
boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed
respectively "Funnel No. 1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails
torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked with the
green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in
the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that
poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was
our first improvement by which we took possession.

The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it
gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper
product of the country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier
of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was
pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the
air of heaven, five feet above the ground.  As for the third room,
which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the
hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the
uprights for another triple tier of beds.

The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock.
Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew
freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine,
the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours
of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.

Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging,
with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
whence I know not.  In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
of the water-drops was loudly audible.  Close by, another shaft led
edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill.  It lay
partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could
see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine,
half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.  Here also a
rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of
the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on
this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber.  But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that
place otherwise than cold and windy.

Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.  I own I had looked
for something different:  a clique of neighbourly houses on a
village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts,
humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains
standing round about, as at Jerusalem.  Here, mountain and house
and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.
The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a
spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature
with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring
together at the ruin of that proud mountain.  The view up the
canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket
clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
trenching on the blue of heaven.  Downwards indeed, from our rock
eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the
pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves
gratefully to our senses.  One way and another, now the die was
cast.  Silverado be it!

After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward.  But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came
down, before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle.
Happy Hansons!  Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I
remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the
details of our installation.

The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the
Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the
trees on the other side of the valley.  Sometimes, we would have it
it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and
again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too
changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in
sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself.
My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.  I hearkened to it
by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out.
Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen;
and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we
sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces.  But for
the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us
into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the
tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon
our heads.  So it blew all night long while I was writing up my
journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.

It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
wandering Hebrews.  We could not suppose they had reached a
destination.  The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their
way to see a gopher-hole.  Boys, we felt to be their special
danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful
irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds:  but
before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
would be war.  We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a
demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor; and
at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we
had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around
a glow-worm.



CHAPTER III. THE RETURN



Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement,
and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us
up.  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to
ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
other side.  It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been "placed."
Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a
ship's kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The absence of
the kettles told its own story:  our Jews said nothing about them;
but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been
charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and
unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful
by its simplicity and truth.

Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good;
they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in
so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they
persuaded me to be a Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in
their talk.  They particularly commanded people who were well to
do.  "HE don't care--ain't it?" was their highest word of
commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
root of their philosophy--it was to be free from care, to be free
to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after
wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless.  The fine,
good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of
kettles perhaps cared greatly.

No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--
it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar,
leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to
devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I
suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.
Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful
of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo!
veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of
conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will
not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
enjoy it hugely.  And now it went -


"O ma vieille Font-georges
Ou volent les rouges-gorges:"


and again, to a more trampling measure -


"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitot qu'on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar."


The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless
land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright
armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man's
travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous
memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that
is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights
up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was
again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had
changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's
motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in
his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was
disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not
guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off,
merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations
about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas!
and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame,
the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and
had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly
delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The
ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews
with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as
simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been
brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so
resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her "old
man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ
it otherwise.

This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully
more.

Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters;
of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey;
how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after
having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I
have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding
whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person
eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the
States.  And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall
downstairs."

At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.
So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our
earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-
faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.
There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into
Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted
at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid
couple; but still the Jews were smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it
was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of
the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That
all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in
various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up
the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of
various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's
till;--these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the
course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all
doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.
Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga,
he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith
an empty pocket.  "You see, I don't mind if it was only five
dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
SOMETHING."

Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it
in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew
tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and
though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close
quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of
humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer,
fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming
from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.
If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was
unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
matter of his brother's mote.



THE ACT OF SQUATTING



There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and
Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
Duke.  Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited
for a rough life.  He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion
as a bed-rook necessary of existence.  Though about the size of a
sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in
all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he
could have played upon it by nature.  It may seem hard to say it of
a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.

The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender
for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the
crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and
boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels
by Hanson's team.

It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not
a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit
of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
in some high stream of air:  Mount Saint Helena still at her
interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.

By noon we had come in sight of the mill:  a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with
tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado
mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither,
then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there
lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and
wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see
sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of
silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six thousand dollars, twelve
hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like
the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling
somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and mill town
showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is
very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud
manufactory upon the mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this
with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill
palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from
Silverado, charged with ore.

By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again,
and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold
provender, until Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun,
there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of
wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many
years no fire had smoked.

Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as
I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
but below it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told,
there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House--our
natural north-west passage to civilization.  I found and followed
it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead
trees.  It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought
you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.  There was nowhere
any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were you to drop
a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was
well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty
miners.  And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of
Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel,
some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a
treasure grotto in a fairy story.  A stream of water, fed by the
invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and,
looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a promising spot for
the imagination.  No boy could have left it unexplored.

The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and
made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once,
I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon,
but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado,
and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the
joints of the mountain.  No wonder that it should better its pace
when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or
that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.

The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.
My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
promised.  But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the
people shook their heads.  Rufe was not a regular man any way, it
seemed; and if he got playing poker--Well, poker was too many for
Rufe.  I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed
a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears;
and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
find do-able in our desert-island state.

The lower room had been the assayer's office.  The floor was thick
with debris--part human, from the former occupants; part natural,
sifted in by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or
floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient
newspapers, above all--for the newspaper, especially when torn,
soon becomes an antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-
house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.  Here is one,
verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has
my envious admiration.


Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30  $25 75
  "    "     "  May lst, to 3rd  ...    2 00
                                       27 75


Where is John Stanley mining now?  Where is S. Chapman, within
whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?  The date was but five
years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado;
like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its
purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke
to us of prehistoric time.  A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-
hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking
relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-
heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a
pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
back, in a more personal manner, to the past?  It pleases me,
besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the
name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the
world.

As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it
with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past,
Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.  "What's
this?" said he.  It contained a granulated powder, something the
colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
widely on the floor.  Had any of us ever seen giant powder?  No,
nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had
somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the
one around us.  I have learnt since that it is a substance not
unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like
tallow candles.

Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who
had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.  He was a
handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but
all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil.  After dark he had
to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an
opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can.  Thus equipped,
he set forth into the forest.  A little while after, his friends
heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all
was still.  On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a
trace of either man or lantern.

It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out
the giant powder.  It seemed never to be far enough away.  And,
after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.

So much for the lower room.  We scraped some of the rougher dirt
off the floor, and left it.  That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no
provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above,
which had once contained the chimney of a stove.

To that upper room we now proceeded.  There were the eighteen bunks
in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to
thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John
Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest.  There was the roof, with a hole
in it through which the sun now shot an arrow.  There was the
floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of
broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently
made a miscarriage with this one.  Without a broom, without hay or
bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.
The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at
last into the open.

Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined:  but the plants were
all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours
of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner,
even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.  Not a
bird, not a beast, not a reptile.  There was no noise in that part
of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the
water musically falling in the shaft.

We wandered to and fro.  We searched among that drift of lumber-
wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of
tracks.  We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.  We
sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green
treetops standing still in the clear air.  Beautiful perfumes,
breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew
sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.  But still there was
no word of Hanson.

I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the
shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and
by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the
mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a
chill descended from the sky.  Night began early in our cleft.
Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.

There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform.  If
the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge,
although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.  It
was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
from the mine.  But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
sat close about it on impromptu seats.  Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
the emptiest building with better than frescoes.  For a while it
was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
was dying like a dolphin.

It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
him a hand.  The elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick
up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man unburthened, the
ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act.  With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
transacted.  Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the
floor.  There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys
in Calistoga.  There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had
forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.  The
Silverado problem was scarce solved.

Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
even, if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my
astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
at our distress.  They thought it "real funny" about the stove-pipe
they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a
plate.  As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till
they should have supped.  See how late they were!  Never had there
been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor often, I suspect,
such a game of poker as that before they started.  But about nine,
as a particular favour, we should have some hay.

So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
resigned ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge
had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to
kindle another.  We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we
ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's
office, perched among boxes.  A single candle lighted us.  It could
scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the
night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.
Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.  It
required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.

But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was
still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see
us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open
stars.

The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through
which we entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a
handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in
Silverado.  And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled
with hay for that night's use.  Through the opposite, or eastern-
looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused
starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in
bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.
At first the silence of the night was utter.  Then a high wind
began in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
to grow higher.  It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found
on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close
our house was planted under the overhanging rock.



THE HUNTER'S FAMILY



There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.  Of pure white
blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the
fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country;
rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English
gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the
dexterity of the savage.  Whence they came is a moot point.  At the
time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
by starvation.  They are widely scattered, however, and easily
recognized.  Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid
of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for
the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity
and a strong sense of independence.  Hunting is their most
congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
detection.  In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly
display activity of body and finesse of mind.  By their names ye
may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena,
Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion,
pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first.  Whether they are
indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to
all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as
Poor Whites or Low-downers.

I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the
name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in
many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.  Rufe
himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a
hunter and an amateur detective.  It was he who pursued Russel and
Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
hayfield.  Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration
for his fate.  In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave.  I
never saw him hurried.  When he spoke, he took out his pipe with
ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story.  His
gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and
slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about.  He
lay long in bed in the morning--rarely indeed, rose before noon; he
loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll
House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
devotion of a curate.  He took an interest in education, was an
active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he
had recently lost the schoolhouse key.  His waggon was broken, but
it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.  Like all truly idle
people, he had an artistic eye.  He chose the print stuff for his
wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork
quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an
Indian.  With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in
word and act.  Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any
society but that of fools.  Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man
smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.

Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
than her lord.  She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure.  But she was on the
surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.  Her
noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
about the woman:  she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman.  She
was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
and turned our red canyon into a salon.

Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
number.  Nor did they want visitors.  An old gentleman, of singular
stolidity, and called Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains
in the same caravan with Rufe--housed with them for awhile during
our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands.  I spell Irvine by guess;
for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could
never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was
a contraction for Rufus.  They were all cheerfully at sea about
their names in that generation.  And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family
names appear to have been coined.  At one time, at least, the
ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
form of literature.  But still times change; and their next
descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
least be clear upon the point.  And anyway, and however his name
should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
Caliban I ever knew.

Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting
our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their
appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity;
he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood
at I forget how much a day.  The way that he set about cutting wood
was characteristic.  We were at that moment patching up and
unpacking in the kitchen.  Down he sat on one side, and down sat
his sister on the other.  Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he,
to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
expectoration.  She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale,
laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth.  He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his
head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.  He had a
tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;
although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet
adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road.  But it was plain he
was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about.  This
was scarcely helpful:  it was even, to amateur carpenters,
embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to
get dinner.  Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died
away among the nutmegs down the path.  That was Irvine's first
day's work in my employment--the devil take him!

The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he
bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.  He prided
himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
HE didn't think much of her, anyway.  He had tried her, he had.  He
had put a question to her.  If a tree a hundred feet high were to
fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?  She
had not been able to solve the problem.  "She don't know nothing,"
he opined.  He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could.  All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject.  A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog.  "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
wasn't it?  It wasn't like a man, that, nohow.  But I got even with
him:  I pisoned HIS dog."  His clumsy utterance, his rude
embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
remarks.  I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
between them, they complete his portrait.  He could lounge, and
wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on.  Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
fellows.  Above all things, he was delighted with himself.  You
would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was
happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.

His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.  He
could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.  As long
as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she
turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop.  His
physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and
admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine.  Yet he
was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to
the weakness.  Something was once wanted from the crazy platform
over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there--"did not
like," as he said, "foolen' round them kind o' places," and let my
wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin.  Vanity, where it
rules, is usually more heroic:  but Irvine steadily approved
himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down
upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the
strength of his superior prudence.

Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that
Irvine was as beautiful as a statue.  His features were, in
themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse
expression that disfigured them.  So much strength residing in so
spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.
He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack
Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
lout.  It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with
such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.
Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and
grumbled curses.  He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as
an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God.  It was a cruel
thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this
creature, endowed--to use the language of theatres--with
extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that he
looked ugly and almost deformed.  It was only by an effort of
abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.

By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we
got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the
work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily,
bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
but cutting wood was a different matter.  Anybody could cut wood;
and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other
things to attend to.  And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came
daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained
intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside.  Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth
day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could,
the light in which I had grown to regard his presence.  I pointed
out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good
many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits.  He rose at
once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he
reckoned he would quit.  And, no one interposing, he departed.