slide to the river, where they voyaged once a month to a distant mill,
but HE did not accompany them. The daughter, seldom seen at Rocky
Canyon, was a half-grown girl, brown as autumn fern, wild-eyed,
disheveled, in a homespun skirt, sunbonnet, and boy's brogans. Such were
the plain facts which skeptical Rocky Canyon opposed to the passengers'
legends. Nevertheless, some of the younger miners found it not out of
their way to go over Skinners Pass on the journey to the river, but with
what success was not told. It was said, however, that a celebrated New
York artist, making a tour of California, was on the coach one day going
through the pass, and preserved the memory of what he saw there in a
well-known picture entitled "Dancing Nymph and Satyr," said by competent
critics to be "replete with the study of Greek life." This did not
affect Rocky Canyon, where the study of mythology was presumably
displaced by an experience of more wonderful flesh-and-blood people, but
later it was remembered with some significance.
Among the improvements already noted, a zinc and wooden chapel had been
erected in the main street, where a certain popular revivalist preacher
of a peculiar Southwestern sect regularly held exhortatory services. His
rude emotional power over his ignorant fellow-sectarians was well known,
while curiosity drew others. His effect upon the females of his flock
was hysterical and sensational. Women prematurely aged by frontier
drudgery and child-bearing, girls who had known only the rigors and
pains of a half-equipped, ill-nourished youth in their battling with the
hard realities of nature around them, all found a strange fascination in
the extravagant glories and privileges of the unseen world he pictured
to them, which they might have found in the fairy tales and nursery
legends of civilized children, had they known them. Personally he was
not attractive; his thin pointed face, and bushy hair rising on
either side of his square forehead in two rounded knots, and his long,
straggling, wiry beard dropping from a strong neck and shoulders,
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