ow not. In that
quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet
above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
wedges, and a pine, half-undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.
Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even
on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place
otherwise than cold and windy.

Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for
something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout
stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and
nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at
Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were
all alike, rusty and down-falling. The hill was here wedged up, and
there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his
picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun
and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The
view up the canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging
in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the
blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we beheld the
greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pine and the sweet smell
of bays and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our senses. One
way and another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it!

After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle. Happy
Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,
that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
installation.

The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the veranda of the Toll
House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the
other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
but it was not various