eir lieutenant. Elijah had only been married for a fortnight, but was
full of spirit, and eager to fight with enemies; and he seems to have
carried this too far; for all that came back to his poor bride was a
lock of his hair and his blessing. He was buried in a bed of lava on the
western slope of Shasta, and his wife died in her confinement, and was
buried by the Blue River.

It was said at the time and long afterward that Elijah Gundry--thus
cut short--was the finest and noblest young man to be found from the
mountains to the ocean. His father, in whose arms he died, led a sad and
lonely life for years, and scarcely even cared (although of Cornish and
New England race) to seize the glorious chance of wealth which lay at
his feet beseeching him. By settlement he had possessed himself of a
large and fertile district, sloping from the mountain-foot along the
banks of the swift Blue River, a tributary of the San Joaquin. And this
was not all; for he also claimed the ownership of the upper valley, the
whole of the mountain gorge and spring head, whence that sparkling water
flows. And when that fury of gold-digging in 1849 arose, very few men
could have done what he did without even thinking twice of it.

For Sampson Gundry stood, like a bull, on the banks of his own river,
and defied the worst and most desperate men of all nations to pollute
it. He had scarcely any followers or steadfast friends to back him; but
his fame for stern courage was clear and strong, and his bodily presence
most manifest. Not a shovel was thrust nor a cradle rocked in the bed of
the Blue River.

But when a year or two had passed, and all the towns and villages, and
even hovels and way-side huts, began to clink with money, Mr. Gundry
gradually recovered a wholesome desire to have some. For now his
grandson Ephraim was growing into biped shape, and having lost his
mother when he first came into the world, was sure to need the more
natural and maternal nutriment of money.

Therefore Sampson Gundry, though he would not dig for gold, wrought
out a plan which he had long thought of. Nature helped him with all her
powers of mountain, forest, and headlong stream. He set up a saw-mill,
and built it himself; and there was no other to be found for twelve
degrees of latitude and perhaps a score of longitude.

CHAPTER IV

THE "KING OF THE MOUNTAINS."

If I think, and try to write forever with the strongest words, I can not
express to any other m