So far, so good.  But we had no firewood.  The next afternoon, I
strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject.  It was a
very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and
his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.
Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
could do a day's work for anybody.  Irvine, thereupon, refused to
have any more to do with my service; he "wouldn't work no more for
a man as had spoke to him's I had done."  I found myself on the
point of the last humiliation--driven to beseech the creature whom
I had just dismissed with insult:  but I took the high hand in
despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop
firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons
being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him
again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious.  The
promise, I am bound to say, was kept.  We soon had a fine pile of
firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for
that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.

The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson.  Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she
had more of the small change of sense.  It was she who faced
Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar
would have had no rule within her doors.  Rufe, to be sure, had a
fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without
exaggeration--perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he
lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts
so high a value on time and money.  Sanity itself is a kind of
convention.  Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon.  Even his
own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
imagination.  His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
way:  it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
dear to his heart.  The pictorial side of his daily business was
never forgotten.  He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
crick" (creek, stream).

There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.  He did not
care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.  He had never
observed scenery.  The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
Caliban Malvolio.  And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
well represented:  the hunter living really in nature; the
clodhopper living merely out of society:  the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.  It is only in
the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's
beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into
the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity.  In towns or the
busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's
existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear
contempt.  But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious
only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.



THE SEA FOGS



A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the
morning.  By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark
and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be
combined.  At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were
still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which
shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
crazy gable.  If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
that earlier and fairier fight.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.  I
rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
The night had been very still.  The little private gale that blew
every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
wont.  But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
mountain slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
entirely changed.  Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as
though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.  I had seen
these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit
aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were
hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the
foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
mountains.  The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about
sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the
white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.
Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the
weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
with a sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.  Away in
the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship.  There were
huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea;
and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving
after all, with a slow and august advance.  And while I was yet
doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away,
conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant
overtaken and swallowed up.  It reappeared in a little, with its
pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
more and then for good.  This set me looking nearer, and I saw that
in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled
in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
me.  I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy
and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean
gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp.  It was
to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and
climbed so high among the mountains.  And now, behold, here came
the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so
beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.

The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.  An eagle,
or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over
the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as
if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
terror, for the eyries of her comrades.  Then, with a long cry, she
disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air.  At
length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.
The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its
advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the
inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight.  I judged
all danger of the fog was over.  This was not Noah's flood; it was
but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it
came.  So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the
sight, I went into the house to light the fire.

I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform
to look abroad.  The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last
I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where
the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County,
it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the
other side like driving smoke.  The wind had climbed along with it;
and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing
below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I
stood.

Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the
opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still
warded it out of our canyon.  Napa valley and its bounding hills
were now utterly blotted out.  The fog, sunny white in the
sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a huge, ragged
cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray.
The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing.  It smelt
strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a
shrewd tang of the sea salt.

Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered
as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly
engulfed whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon
must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous
air.  As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our
minds.  We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the
fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the
stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some
flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on
upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the
powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.  Had this been
indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the
emotion would have been similar in kind.  I played with the idea,
as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his
fancy.  The look of the thing helped me.  And when at last I began
to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the
raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.

As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the
upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from
what I had beheld at daybreak.  For, first, the sun now fell on it
from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a
great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.
And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred
feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all
the broken country below me, still stood out.  Napa valley was now
one with Sonoma on the west.  On the hither side, only a thin
scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the
gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear
sunny country on the east.  There it was soon lost; for it fell
instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the
eastern sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other
side, the deluge was immense.  A spray of thin vapour was thrown
high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.  Here and
there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and
for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray
like the arm of a drowning man.  But still the imagination was
dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more.  Had this
indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge
of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course,
disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!  And yet water it
was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.  The sunny
plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting
spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with
every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the
vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay
our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying
its unbroken sunshine.  About eleven, however, thin spray came
flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had
hunted out its Jonah after all.  But it was the last effort.  The
wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from
the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-
fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
little rags of cloud.  And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear
green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
blowing in the air.

This was the great Russian campaign for that season.  Now and then,
in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen
far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed,
nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.



THE TOLL HOUSE



The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines,
with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and
well trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable
door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back
parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and
equally anxious to lend or borrow books;--dozed all day in the
dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.  There were no neighbours,
except the Hansons up the hill.  The traffic on the road was
infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a
dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over "the grade" to that
metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the
passage of the stages.

The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the
morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones
of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in the
afternoon.  She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood,
for her health.  Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was
Mr. Jennings, the engineer.  In short, the place was a kind of
small Davos:  consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop in the most
unbroken idleness.  Jennings never did anything that I could see,
except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar
and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.  Corwin and Rufe
did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had
to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into
much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.

Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible
prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion,
a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not
represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses.  A large
book was laid religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I
believe, its name--full of the raciest experiences in England.  The
author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
traveller had ill requited his reception.  His book, in short, was
a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and
there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside,
mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins,"
and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery,
fit to knock you down.  The mention of this book reminds me of
another and far racier picture of our island life.  The latter
parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the
country which they celebrate.  No man's education can be said to be
complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment,
till he has made the acquaintance of "the Reverend Patterson,
director of the Evangelical Society."  To follow the evolutions of
that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr.
Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.
But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.  Only,
alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny "Ouida" figured.
So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.

The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams
enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.  They seemed
never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the
little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the
trees.  Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture:  summer
sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless.  A cuckoo-clock, a great
rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing
house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar,
and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma'ams in
the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their
inaction.  Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard
indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or
perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away
among the woods:  but with these exceptions, it was sleep and
sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.

A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.  The
ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations.  Mr.
Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had
been waiting for all day about to happen at last!  The boarders
gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the
road with shaded eyes.  And as yet there was no sign for the
senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain road.  The birds,
to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set
down to instinct this premonitory bustle.

And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House
with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time
to subside, before the second was abreast of it.  Huge concerns
they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves,
the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol;
and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding
a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and
clatter.  This the Toll House?--with its city throng, its jostling
shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar?  The mind
would not receive it!  The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly
credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-
bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers' eyes.  They paused there but to pass:  the blue-
clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust
coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with
her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down
for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the
line.  Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined
them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of
human electricity.  Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one
of life's crossing-places.  Here I beheld one man, already famous
or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots:  and another who, if not yet
known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of
the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths
in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilizations.  For all his lust
and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the
shadow of the gallows.  He imagined a vain thing; and while he
drained his cock-tail, Holbein's death was at his elbow.  Once,
too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers--like
the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the
next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and
wines.  To him, journeying from one human place to another, this
was a trifle; but to me!  No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.

And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.
Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then,
there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and
the lamps and stars.  But the Toll House is far up stream, and near
its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it.  Before
you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
whips volleyed, and the tide was gone.  North and south had the two
stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there
was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks,
before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the
seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed
corners.  Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great
barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.

As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine;
the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint
stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake
to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.  A fine
place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo
clock hooting of its far home country; the croquet mallets,
eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of--the
turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a
salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.



A STARRY DRIVE



In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The
queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was
sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no
longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage
on the green.  By that time we had begun to realize the
difficulties of our position.  We had found what an amount of
labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the
dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us
when we returned.  We could have given him a whole house to
himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on
the money question we were prepared to go far.  Kong Sam Kee, the
Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to
day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.

At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the
waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman,
with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome,
gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy
white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it
for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house
near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o' nights with other
China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he
first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was
satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He was wedded to his wash-
houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our
mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour before
we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high
street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most
musical inflections.

We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe
Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand
at an omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most
valued--as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in
both.

The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have
been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully
ere we struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a
night.  It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters
that ever dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy,
powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a
serpent's back.  The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly
forth like lamps.  The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud;
half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater luminaries shone each
more clearly than a winter's moon.  Their light was dyed in every
sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the
tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled
arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was
one chaos of contesting luminaries--a hurry-burly of stars.
Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.

As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first
grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven
dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone
had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their
customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its first
bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night.
Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any
cause.  Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the
mountain.  Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of
silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and
upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among the trees, we
beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.

"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half-
taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.


"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of shadow
pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's golden
shores."


So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.  And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put
out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.  The wonder of the
drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the
air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen
for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens.  It
was gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars
with the same mind.  He who has seen the sea commoved with a great
hurricane, thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it
only in a calm.  And the difference between a calm and a hurricane
is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of
night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive.  Two in
our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that
bore no comparison.  The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of
the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars
themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were
things that we had never seen before and shall never see again.

Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade,
wound up by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying
gargoyle of the chute.  Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep,
with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was
pleasant "to be home."  The waggon turned and drove away, the noise
gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
Caliban's great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.

The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the
lumber on the platform.  The one tall pine beside. the ledge was
steeped in silver.  Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with
three discordant squalls.  But once we had lit a candle, and began
to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our
stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and
permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado.  A bed
had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be
fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these household
duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the
stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our
return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying
bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-
pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the
world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people.  Yet, in
our absence, the palace had been sacked.  Wild cats, so the Hansons
said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and
two knives.



EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE



No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story
of the mine.  We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense
and toil, we lived so entirely in the wreck of that great
enterprise, like mites in the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of
the old din and bustle haunted our repose.  Our own house, the
forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails, the windlass, the mass of
broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the
other on the platform where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with
the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the ledge, that
great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped apart by
wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads, the
one tall pine precariously nodded--these stood for its greatness;
while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and
the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human
touches and realized for us the story of the past.

I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the
forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and
seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence
broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the
royal family about the battered palace, and my mind has gone back
to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tutti
of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the canyon; the
assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the carts below on the road,
and their cargo of red mineral bounding and thundering down the
iron chute.  And now all gone--all fallen away into this sunny
silence and desertion:  a family of squatters dining in the
assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
rang with picks.

But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay,
was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other
flitting cities.  Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake
County side there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand
inhabitants dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the
sale of whiskey.  Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena,
there was at the same date, a second large encampment, its name, if
it ever had one, lost for me.  Both of these have perished, leaving
not a stick and scarce a memory behind them.  Tide after tide of
hopeful miners have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain,
coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush.  Last,
in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in the
valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally, by
Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in
turn declined and died away.


"Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
Of the eternal silence."


As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports
were current.  According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars
were taken out of that great upright seam, that still hung open
above us on crazy wedges.  Then the ledge pinched out, and there
followed, in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and
tunnelling in all directions, and a great consequent effusion of
dollars, until, all parties being sick of the expense, the mine was
deserted, and the town decamped.  According to the second version,
told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair, mine, mill,
and town, were parts of one majestic swindle.  There had never come
any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to
come.  At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.  They
came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in
"old cigar boxes."  They discharged their load at Silverado, in the
hour of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with
their mysterious drivers to their unknown source.  In this way,
twenty thousand pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in under cover
of night, in these old cigar boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral;
carted down to the mill; crushed, amalgated, and refined, and
despatched to the city as the proper product of the mine.  Stock-
jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a profitable
business in San Francisco.

I give these two versions as I got them.  But I place little
reliance on either, my belief in history having been greatly
shaken.  For it chanced that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a
critical hour; great events in its history were about to happen--
did happen, as I am led to believe; nay, and it will be seen that I
played a part in that revolution myself.  And yet from first to
last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even
now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.  That there was
some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in the
character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.

Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I
will call a Mr. Ronalds.  I only knew him through the
extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a
momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage; and again, and
much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman like you or
me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while with better and
worse fortune.  So, through a defective window-pane, you may see
the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
potbellied dwarf.

To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he
held it would ran out upon the 30th of June--or rather, as I
suppose, it had run out already, and the month of grace would
expire upon that day, after which any American citizen might post a
notice of his own, and make Silverado his.  This, with a sort of
quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an early period of our acquaintance.
There was no silver, of course; the mine "wasn't worth nothing, Mr.
Stevens," but there was a deal of old iron and wood around, and to
gain possession of this old wood and iron, and get a right to the
water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to "jump the claim."

Of course, I had no objection.  But I was filled with wonder.  If
all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune,
was to prevent him taking them?  "His right there was none to
dispute."  He might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats
had laid hands upon our knives and hatchet.  Besides, was this mass
of heavy mining plant worth transportation?  If it was, why had not
the rightful owners carted it away?  If it was, would they not
preserve their title to these movables, even after they had lost
their title to the mine?  And if it were not, what the better was
Rufe?  Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was even no wood to
cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be gained.
Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what Rufe
remembered?  The days of grace were not yet over:  any fine morning
he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his
inheritance.  However, it was none of my business; all seemed
legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.

On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as
usual, in her sun-bonnet.  The time would be out on Tuesday, she
reminded us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I
had no idea what it was to be.  And suppose Ronalds came? we asked.
She received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her
fine teeth.  He could not find the mine to save his life, it
appeared, without Rufe to guide him.  Last year, when he came, they
heard him "up and down the road a hollerin' and a raisin' Cain."
And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe,
"Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine
is, anyway!"  Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the
clump, I thought this a remarkable example.  The sense of locality
must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.

That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work
on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on
the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens,
with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a
parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the
path.  We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter
and firmer than was usual with our country neighbours.  And
presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid
gloves, came debauching past the house.  They looked in that place
like a blasphemy.

"Good evening," they said.  For none of us had stirred; we all sat
stiff with wonder.

"Good evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, "A
stiff climb," I added.

"Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this
path."

I did not like the man's tone.  None of us liked it.  He did not
seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like
favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and
tunnel.

Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.  "We drifted
every sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge."  Then again:
"It pinched out here."  And once more:  "Every minor that ever
worked upon it says there's bound to be a ledge somewhere."

These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
damning significance.  We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to
face with our superior.  It is the worst of all quaint and of all
cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some
humiliation.  I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was
none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.
I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee,
and apologized.  He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly
pleasant--more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he
passed off into praises of the former state of Silverado.  "It was
the busiest little mining town you ever saw:" a population of
between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full
blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but champagne, and
hope the order of the day.  Ninety thousand dollars came out; a
hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
thousand.  The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley,
were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the
population was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to
wither in the branch before it was cut at the root.  The last shot
that was fired knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole
in the roof of our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit
slug-a-beds towards afternoon.  A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate
the days of silence.

Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised;
and I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended
treachery.  But then I had Hanson to consider.  I was in much the
same position as Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom "the rogue
had taken into his confidence."  And again, here was Ronalds on the
spot.  He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson and I.
If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest in the world.
For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on the very
front of our house, between the door and window, painted in
cinnabar--the pigment of the country--with doggrel rhymes and
contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily
figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim already
jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
But no, nothing could save that man; quem deus vult perdere, prius
dementat.  As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.

Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed,
Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news.  It was
like a scene in a ship's steerage:  all of us abed in our different
tiers, the single candle struggling with the darkness, and this
plump, handsome woman, seated on an upturned valise beside the
bunks, talking and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the
rafters rang.  Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as many
holes in it as our barrack, must long ago have gone to her last
port.  Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson's
loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was uppermost
for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as a
kind of musical accompaniment.  But I now found there was an art in
it, I found it less communicative than silence itself.  I wished to
know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe;
and why, being on the spot, he had not refreshed his title.  She
talked interminably on, but her replies were never answers.  She
fled under a cloud of words; and when I had made sure that she was
purposely eluding me, I dropped the subject in my turn, and let her
rattle where she would.

She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the
claim was to be jumped on the morrow.  How?  If the time were not
out, it was impossible.  Why?  If Ronalds had come and gone, and
done nothing, there was the less cause for hurry.  But again I
could reach no satisfaction.  The claim was to be jumped next
morning, that was all that she would condescend upon.

And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a
whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit.
That day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little
roll of paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove,
his large, dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson,
in her Sunday best; and all the children, from the oldest to the
youngest;--arrived in a procession, tailing one behind another up
the path.  Caliban was absent, but he had been chary of his
friendly visits since the row; and with that exception, the whole
family was gathered together as for a marriage or a christening.
Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas near
the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a circle, one
on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of
plank.  Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where
there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the
dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they
poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of
the glen.  Meantime we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson
and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson
rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but
keeping the party at their ease like a courtly hostess.

Not a word occurred about the business of the day.  Once, twice,
and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by
the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring
verbiage of his wife.  There is nothing of the Indian brave about
me, and I began to grill with impatience.  At last, like a highway
robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his
business.  Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this
was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws,
and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
barrack.  There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his
papers with fastidious deliberation.  There were two sheets of
note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part
print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated by the
rains.  It was by this identical piece of paper that the mine had
been held last year.  For thirteen months it had endured the
weather and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder of
the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading it before me on
the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms, with some
necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.  One
was then to be placed on the same cairn--a "mound of rocks" the
notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.

Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
locator's name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed
that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye.  "I don't
think that'll be necessary," he said slowly; "just you write it
down."  Perhaps this mighty hunter, who was the most active member
of the local school board, could not write.  There would be nothing
strange in that.  The constable of Calistoga is, and has been for
years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I remember rightly, blind.  He had
more need of the emoluments than another, it was explained; and it
was easy for him to "depytize," with a strong accent on the last.
So friendly and so free are popular institutions.

When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
Breedlove, "Will you step up here a bit?" and after they had
disappeared a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket,
they came back again, minus a notice, and the deed was done.  The
claim was jumped; a tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet
long by six hundred wide, with all the earth's precious bowels, had
passed from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its
name from the "Mammoth" to the "Calistoga."  I had tried to get
Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself, and after Garfield,
the Republican Presidential candidate of the hour--since then
elected, and, alas! dead--but all was in vain.  The claim had once
been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety in
returning to that.

And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in
darkness, lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of
gossip.  And perhaps the most curious feature of the whole matter
is this:  that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of the
mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the
while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and
contradictions.  Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.



TOILS AND PLEASURES



I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days
passed and what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do
and how we set about doing it, in our mountain hermitage.  The
house, after we had repaired the worst of the damages, and filled
in some of the doors and windows with white cotton cloth, became a
healthy and a pleasant dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and
haunted by the outdoor perfumes of the glen.  Within, it had the
look of habitation, the human look.  You had only to go into the
third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting
earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our lodging, with the
beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water behind
the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the table
roughly laid against a meal,--and man's order, the little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the
rich passivity of nature.  And yet our house was everywhere so
wrecked and shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun
found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many
open chinks, that we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the
comforts of a roof and much of the gaiety and brightness of al
fresco life.  A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should
have been drowned out like mice.  But ours was a Californian
summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a shower
of rain.