ne verb" with the family pottage? He returned
before I could answer this self-asked inquiry, and resumed coolly his
broken narrative. Finding myself forgotten in the man I had so long
hesitated to introduce to my friends, I retired to rest early, only to
hear, through the thin partitions, two hours later, enthusiastic
praises of the new guest from the voluble lips of the girls, as they
chatted in the next room before retiring.

At midnight I was startled by the sound of horses' hoofs and the
jingling of spurs below. A conversation between my host and some
mysterious personage in the darkness was carried on in such a low tone
that I could not learn its import. As the cavalcade rode away I raised
the window.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Sylvester, coolly, "only another one of those playful
homicidal freaks peculiar to the country. A man was shot by Cherokee
Jack over at Lagrange this morning, and that was the sheriff of
Calaveras and his posse hunting him. I told him I'd seen nobody but
you and your friend. By the way, I hope the cursed noise hasn't
disturbed him. The poor fellow looked as if he wanted rest."

I thought so, too. Nevertheless, I went softly to his room. It was
empty. My impression was that he had distanced the sheriff of
Calaveras about two hours.

A GHOST OF THE SIERRAS

It was a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and
muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our
backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken
interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy
above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose active persecution
we had just escaped, searched for us through the woods, but its keen
blade was dulled and turned aside by intercostal boughs, and its
brightness dissipated in nebulous mists throughout the roofing of the
dim, brown aisles around us. We were in another atmosphere, under
another sky; indeed, in another world than the dazzling one we had just
quitted. The grave silence seemed so much a part of the grateful
coolness, that we hesitated to speak, and for some moments lay quietly
outstretched on the pine tassels where we had first thrown ourselves.
Finally, a voice broke the silence:--

"Ask the old Major; he knows all about it!"

The person here alluded to under that military title was myself. I
hardly need explain to any Californian that it by no means followed
that I