University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
A STORM IN THE SIERRAS.

VIRGIN gold, like truth, lies at the bottom.
It is a great task in the placer mines, as a
rule, particularly in the streams, to get on
the bed-rock to open a claim and strike a lead.
When this is done the rest is simple enough. You
have only to keep your claim open, to see that the
drain is not clogged, the tail race kept open, and that
the water does not break in and fill up your excavation,
by which you have reached the bed rock.
All this the Prince and I had accomplished. The
summer was sufficiently cool to be tolerable in toil:
the season was unusually healthy, and all was well.

At night, when the flush of the sun would be blown
from the tree tops to the clouds, we two would sit at
the cabin door in the gloaming, and look across and
up, far up, into the steep and sable skirting forest of
firs, and listen to the calls of the cat-bird, or the
coyote lifting his voice in a plaintive murmur for his
mate on the other side.

The Doctor would sit there too, in silence, close
at hand, and dream and forget the ways of man; and,
perhaps, think sadly, but certainly enough, there was
one place, one narrow place, at last, where he would
fit in and no one would come to disturb him.

Klamat would come in with a string of quails,
sometimes, at dusk, or a venison saddle, a red fox or
a badger, stand his gun in the corner with his club,
and turn himself to rest close at hand.

Paquita would drop down from the woods on the
hill above the cabin, the little belle and beauty of the
camp. But she never spoke to the miners or any
one, save to only answer them in the briefest way
possible.

They hardly liked this; and they hardly liked the
Prince from the start, I think, anyhow. He was, as an
expression of the time went, a little too “fine-haired.”
He spoke too properly; he never “got on any glorious
benders,” with the western men, nor could he
eat codfish, or talk about Boston, with the eastern.
He took hold of no man's hand hastily.

I like that.

Paquita had a great deal to tell about Mount
Shasta. She had been on the side beyond. In
fact her home was there, she said, and she described
the whole land in detail. A country sloping
off gradually toward the east and south; densely
timbered, save little dimples of green prairies, alive

with game, dotted down here and there, buried in
the dark and splendid forests on the little trout
streams that wound still and crooked through wood
and meadow.

She had been out here on the Klamat on a visit,
with her mother and others, the fall and winter
before. She said they had come down from the
lakes in canoes. She also insisted strongly that her
father was a great chief of the Modocs and mountain
Shastas.

Indians are great travelers, far greater than is
generally believed, and it was quite reasonable to
take that part of the young lady's story as literally
true; but the part about her father being a great
chief was set down as one of her innocent fictions
by which she wished to dignify herself, and appear
of some importance in the eyes of the Prince.

Still as there had been quite a sensation in camp
about new mines in that direction, it was interesting
to talk to one who had been through the country,
and could give us some accurate account of it. After
that, finding the Prince was interested enough to
listen, she would take great pleasure in describing
the country, character, and habits of the Indians, and
the kind of game with which the forest abounded.

She would map out on the ground with a stick
the whole country, as you would draw a chart on
the black board.

The feeling against the Doctor had not yet blown
over. It was pretty generally understood that the
sheriff or a deputy from across the mountain would
soon be over with a warrant for his apprehension.

Why not escape? There are some popular errors
of opinion that are amusing. Men suppose that if
a man is in the mountains he is safe, hid away, and
secure; that he has only to step aside in the brush
and be seen no more.

As a rule, it is infinitely better to be in the heart of
a city. Here was a camp of three thousand men.
Each man knew the face of his neighbour. There
was but one way to enter this camp, but one way to
go out; that way led to the city. We were in a
sac, the further end of a cave, as it were. You
could not go this way, or that, through the mountains
above. There were no trails; there was no
food. You would get lost; you would starve.

Besides, there were wild beasts, and wilder men,
ready to revenge the hundred massacres up and down
the country, not unlike the one described. Here, in
that day at least, if a man did wrong he could not
hide. The finger of God pointed him out to all.

Late one September day it grew intensely sultry;
there was a haze in the sky and a circle about the
sun. There was not a breath. The perspiration
came out and stood on the brow, even as we rested
in the shadow of the pines. A singular haze; such
a day, it is said, as precedes earthquakes.

The black crickets ceased to sing; the striped
lizards slid quick as ripples across the rocks, and
birds went swift as arrows overhead, but uttered
no cry. There was not a sound in the air nor on
the earth.

Paquita came rushing down to the claim, pale and
excited. She lifted her two hands above her head
as she stood on the bank, and called to us to come
up from the mine. “Come,” she cried, “there will
be a storm. The trees will blow and break against
each other. There will be a flood, a sea, a river in
the mountains. Come!” She swayed her body to
and fro, and the trees began to sway above her on
the hills, but not a breath had touched the mines.

Then it grew almost dark; we fairly had to feel
our way up the ladder. A big drop sank in the
water close at hand, splashing audibly; the trees
surged above us and began to snap like reeds.

There was a roar like the sea—loud, louder. Nearer
now the trees began to bend and turn and lick their
limbs and trunks, interweave and smite and crush,
and lurch until their tops were like one black and
boiling sea.

Fast, faster, the rain in great warm drops began
to strike us in the face, as we miners hastened up the
hill to the shelter of the cabin. At the door we
turned to look. The darkness of death was upon us;
we could hear the groans and the battling of the

trees, the howling of the tempest, but all was darkness,
blackness, desolation. Lightning cleft the
heavens.

A sheet of flame—as if the hand of God had thrust
out through the dark and smote the mountain side
with a sword of fire.

And then the thunder shook the earth till it
trembled, as if Shasta had been shaken loose and
broken from its foundation. No one spoke. The
lightning lit the cabin like a bonfire. Klamat stood
there in the cabin by his club and gun. There was
in his face a grim delight. The Doctor lay on his
face in his bunk, hiding his eyes in his two hands.

No one undressed that night in the camp.

The next morning the fury of the storm was over,
but it was not yet settled. We ventured out and
looked down into the stream. It was nearly large
enough to float a steamer. The claim was filled up
as perfectly as when we first took it from the
hands of the Creator. Ten feet of water flowed
swift and muddy over it towards the Klamat and the
sea.

Logs, boards, shingles, rockers, toms, sluices,
flumes, pans, riffles, aprons went drifting, bobbing,
dodging down the angry river like a thousand eager
swimmers.

The storm had stolen everything, and was rushing
with his plunder straight as could be to the sea, as

if he feared that dawn should catch him in the
camp, and the miners come upon him to reclaim
their goods.

Every man in the camp was ruined. No man had
dreamed of this. Maybe a few had saved up a little
fortune, but, as a rule, all their fortunes lay in the
folds of the next few months. Every man had his
burden now to bear. The mortgage on the farm,
the home for the old, the orphans, the invalid
sister.

Brave men! they said nothing; they set their
teeth, looked things squarely in the face, but did not
complain. One man, however, who watched the
flood from a point on the other side and saw his
flume swept away, swung his old slouched hat,
danced a sort of savage hokee-pokee, and sang:

A strange song, indeed!

To them this disaster meant another weary winter
in the mines—disease, scurvy, death. Many could
not endure it. They understood their claims could
not be opened till another year, and set their faces for
other mines which they had heard of, further on.
Mining life is not unlike life at large.

We two had not saved much money. And what
portion of that had I earned? I could not well
claim a great deal, surely. How much would be

left when the debts were paid—the butcher and the
others? True, the claim was valuable, but it had
no value now—not so much as a sack of flour.
There were too many wanting to get away, and men
had not yet learned the worth of a mine. Sometimes
in these days new excitements, new diversions,
would tap a camp, drain it dry, and not leave a soul
to keep the coyotes from taking possession of the
cabins.

“What will you do?” said the Prince to me one
day, as we sat on the bank, wishing in vain for the
water to subside.

“We cannot reach the bed-rock again till far into
the next year. What will you do?”

“May I stay with you?”

The strong man reached me his two hands—“As
long as I live and you live, my little one, and
there is a blanket to my name we will sleep under
it together.

“We will leave this camp. I have hated it from
the first. I have grown old here in a year. I
cannot breathe in this narrow canon with its great
walls against the clouds. We will go.”