himself alone, free to make his toilet, unembarrassed by company. But
even then he would have preferred the rough companionship of the miners
in the common dormitory of the general store to this intrusion upon
the half-civilization of the women, their pitiable little comforts and
secret makeshifts. His disgust of his own indecision which brought him
there naturally recoiled in the direction of his host and hostesses, and
after a hurried ablution, a change of linen, and an attempt to remove
the stains of travel from his clothes, he strode out impatiently into
the open air again.
It was singularly mild even for the season. The southwest trades blew
softly, and whispered to him of San Francisco and the distant Pacific,
with its long, steady swell. He turned again to the overflowed Flat
beneath him, and the sluggish yellow water that scarcely broke a ripple
against the walls of the half-submerged cabins. And this was the water
for whose going down they were waiting with an immobility as tranquil
as the waters themselves! What marvelous incompetency,--or what infinite
patience! He knew, of course, their expected compensation in this
"ground sluicing" at Nature's own hand; the long rifts in the banks of
the creek which so often showed "the color" in the sparkling scales of
river gold disclosed by the action of the water; the heaps of reddish
mud left after its subsidence around the walls of the cabins,--a deposit
that often contained a treasure a dozen times more valuable than the
cabin itself! And then he heard behind him a laugh, a short and panting
breath, and turning, beheld a young woman running towards him.
In his first astounded sight of her, in her limp nankeen sunbonnet,
thrown back from her head by the impetus of her flight, he saw only too
much hair, two much white teeth, too much eye-flash, and, above
all,--as it appeared to him,--too much confidence in the power of these
qualities. Even as she ran, it seemed to him that she was pulling down
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