have got, I don't see how it's going to help matters," she said
dryly.

"No, that's not it? We really have an idea. Now look here."

Mrs. Price "looked here." This process seemed to the superficial
observer to be merely submitting her waist and shoulders to the arms of
her nieces, and her ears to their confidential and coaxing voices.

Twice she said "it couldn't be thought of," and "it was impossible;"
once addressed Kate as "You limb!" and finally said that she "wouldn't
promise, but might write!"

*****

It was two days before Christmas. There was nothing in the air, sky,
or landscape of that Sierran slope to suggest the season to the Eastern
stranger. A soft rain had been dropping for a week on laurel, pine, and
buckeye, and the blades of springing grasses and shyly opening flowers.
Sedate and silent hillsides that had grown dumb and parched towards the
end of the dry season became gently articulate again; there were murmurs
in hushed and forgotten canyons, the leap and laugh of water among the
dry bones of dusty creeks, and the full song of the larger forks and
rivers. Southwest winds brought the warm odor of the pine sap swelling
in the forest, or the faint, far-off spice of wild mustard springing
in the lower valleys. But, as if by some irony of Nature, this gentle
invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance and
discomfort to the haunts and works of man. The ditches were overflowed,
the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift, and the trails
and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud. The stage-coach
from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the mountain highway, its
wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an unctuous pigment like mud
and blood, passed out of it through the overflowed and dangerous ford,
and emerged in spotless purity, leaving its stains behind with Rough
and Ready. A week of enforced idleness on the river "Bar" had driven
the miners to the more comfortable recreation of the saloon bar, its
mirrors, its florid paintings, its armchairs, and its stove. The steam
of their wet boots and the smoke of their pipes hung over the latter
like the sacrificial incense from an altar. But the attitude of the men
was more critical and censorious than contented, and showed little of
the gentleness of the weather or season.

"Did you hear if the stage brought down any more relations of
Spindler's?"

The barkeeper, to whom this question was addressed, shifted his l