nd Jowler will find him, and
clear Uncle Sam's reputation."

CHAPTER IX

WATER-SPOUT

If Mr. Gundry was in one way right, he was equally wrong in the other.
Firm came home quite safe and sound, though smothered with snow and
most hungry; but he thought that he should have staid out all the night,
because he had failed of his errand. Jowler also was full of discontent
and trouble of conscience. He knew, when he kicked up his heels in the
snow, that his duty was to find somebody, and being of Alpine pedigree,
and trained to act up to his ancestry, he now dropped his tail with
failure.

"It comes to the same thing," said Sawyer Gundry; "it is foolish to
be so particular. A thousand better men have sunk through being so
pig-headed. We shall find the rogue toward the end of March, or in
April, if the season suits. Firm, eat your supper and shake yourself."

This was exactly the Sawyer's way--to take things quietly when convinced
that there was no chance to better them. He would always do his best
about the smallest trifle; but after that, be the matter small or great,
he had a smiling face for the end of it.

The winter, with all its weight of sameness and of dreariness, went at
last, and the lovely spring from the soft Pacific found its gradual way
to us. Accustomed as I was to gentler climates and more easy changes,
I lost myself in admiration of this my first Californian spring. The
flowers, the leagues and leagues of flowers, that burst into color and
harmony--purple, yellow, and delicate lilac, woven with bright crimson
threads, and fringed with emerald-green by the banks, and blue by the
course of rivers, while deepened here and there by wooded shelter and
cool places, with the silver-gray of the soft Pacific waning in far
distance, and silken vapor drawing toward the carding forks of the
mountain range; and over all the never-wearying azure of the limpid sky:
child as I was, and full of little worldly troubles on my own account,
these grand and noble sights enlarged me without any thinking.

The wheat and the maize were grown apace, and beans come into full
blossom, and the peaches swinging in the western breeze were almost as
large as walnuts, and all things in their prime of freshness, ere the
yellow dust arrived, when a sudden melting of snow in some gully sent
a strong flood down our Blue River. The saw-mill happened to be hard at
work; and before the gear could be lifted, some damage was done to the