The Project Gutenberg EBook of Devil's Ford, by Bret Harte

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Title: Devil's Ford

Author: Bret Harte

Release Date: May 13, 2006 [EBook #2286]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEVIL'S FORD ***

Produced by Donald Lainson

DEVIL'S FORD

by Bret Harte

DEVIL'S FORD

CHAPTER I

It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil's Ford. The half a
dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some
overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of
fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together
on the narrow gorge of Devil's Spur, or cast up on its steep sides. So
sudden and violent had been the change of fortune, that the dwellers
in the older cabins had not had time to change with it, but still kept
their old habits, customs, and even their old clothes. The flour pan in
which their daily bread was mixed stood on the rude table side by side
with the "prospecting pans," half full of gold washed up from their
morning's work; the front windows of the newer tenements looked upon
the one single thoroughfare, but the back door opened upon the uncleared
wilderness, still haunted by the misshapen bulk of bear or the nightly
gliding of catamount.

Neither had success as yet affected their boyish simplicity and the
frankness of old frontier habits; they played with their new-found
riches with the naive delight of children, and rehearsed their glowing
future with the importance and triviality of school-boys.

"I've bin kalklatin'," said Dick Mattingly, leaning on his long-handled
shovel with lazy gravity, "that when I go to Rome this winter, I'll get
one o' them marble sharps to chisel me a statoo o' some kind to set up
on the spot where we made our big strike. Suthin' to remember it by, you
know."

"What kind o' statoo--Washington or Webster?" asked one of the Kearney
brothers, without looking up from his work.

"No--I reckon one o' them fancy groups--one o' them Latin goddesses that
Fairfax is always gassin' about, sorter leadin', directin' and bossin'
us where to dig."

"You'd make a healthy-lookin' figger i