atch--an oasis of food in a desert of
starvation. They paused long enough at the cabin to boil a great
kettleful and to feast ravenously. This gave them strength to tramp on
to Kamloops. We saw that the Irish mother, Mrs Shubert, with her two
children, accompanied this party. The day after reaching Kamloops she
gave birth to a child.

Did the Overlanders find the gold which each man's rainbow hopes had
dreamed? They had followed the rainbow over the ends of earth. Was
the pot of gold at the end of {87} the rainbow? You will find an
occasional Overlander passing the sunset of his days in quiet retreat
at Yale or Hope or Quesnel or Barkerville. He does not wear evidence
of great earthly possessions, though he may refer wistfully to the
golden age of those long-past adventurous days. The leaders who
survived became honoured citizens of British Columbia. Few came back
to the East. They passed their lives in the wild, free, new land that
had given them such harsh experiences.

{88}

CHAPTER VII

LIFE AT THE MINES

Fortunately, in that winter of '62-'63, there was a great deal of work
to be done in the mining country, and men were in high demand. The
ordinary wage was ten dollars a day, and men who could be trusted, and
who were brave enough to pack the gold out to the coast, received
twenty and even as high as fifty dollars a day. There is a letter,
written by Sir Matthew Begbie, describing how the mountain trails were
infested that winter by desperadoes lying in wait for the miners who
came staggering over the trail literally weighted down with gold. The
miners found what the great banks have always found, that the presence
of unused gold is a nuisance and a curse. They had to lug the gold in
leather sacks with them to their work, and back with them to their
shacks, and they always carried firearms ready for use. There was very
little shooting at the mines, but if a bad man 'turned up missing,' no
one {89} asked whether he had 'hoofed' it down the trail, or whether he
hung as a sign of warning from a pole set horizontally at a proper
height between two trees. In a mining camp there is no mercy for the
crook. If the trail could have told tales, there would have been many
a story of dead men washed up on the bars, of sneak-thieves given
thirty-nine lashes and like the scapegoat turned out into the mountain
wilds--a rough-and-ready justice administered without judge or jury.

But a woman was as