us from the shoulder of the
mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not
to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should "camp someveres
around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house
with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,
subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with
haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of
speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson
into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his
forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to
her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
still some houses at the tunnel.

Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong we followed
a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that
road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below, red,
rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling
stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A
rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle,
across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore;
and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it
millward down the mountain.

The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the
dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose
rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular
platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold
projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the
proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air,
and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied
country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of
iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of
lumber, old wood, old iron, a blacksmith's forge on one side, half
buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, a