"when
I was bringing your freight, Max, from Sacramento."

"I remember," nodded the landlord; "you started with two kegs and got
here with about half a one; the leakage was tremenjus on that trip."

"True; the blizzards is always rough on Mountain Dew, and sorter makes
it shrink," replied the unblushing Vose.

"Can't you stop the casks leaking so much," inquired Felix Brush, who
had been a parson in Missouri, and claimed that he had never been
"unfrocked."

The landlord solemnly swayed his head.

"Not as long as Vose has charge of the freight----"

At that instant a dull but resounding thump was heard on the roof
overhead. It shook every log in the structure, checked speech and
caused each man to look wonderingly at his neighbor.

"The mountain has fell on us!" exclaimed Ike Hoe in a husky whisper.

"If it was the mountain," said Budge Isham, slightly raising his
voice, as the courage of the party came back; "none of us would be
able to tell of it."

"Then it's a rock--well, I'm blessed! the thing is moving!"

Something was certainly astir in the mass of snow overhead.

"I guess it's a angel that has lost its way," submitted Hoe.

"More likely it's a grizzly b'ar that's stumbled off the rocks--"

But all these speculations were scattered to the winds by the sound of
a voice muffled and seemingly far away, which came to them through the
storm:

"_Helloa, the house_!"

CHAPTER II

WHAT THE BLIZZARD BROUGHT TO NEW CONSTANTINOPLE

A moment after the hail was heard from the roof, the muffled noise
which accompanied it ceased. The stranger groping about in the snowy
gloom had stepped off the roof into the huge drift outside the
Heavenly Bower, and a minute later, lifted the latch of the door and
pushed in among the astonished miners. They saw the figure of a sturdy
man holding something in his arms, so wrapped round with blankets and
coverings that no one could tell its nature. He stamped the snow from
his boots, shook himself like a shaggy dog, then walked heavily to the
chair which Budge Isham placed near the fire for him, and almost fell
into it.

"Good evening, friends," he said in a grave voice; "It was no fault of
mine that I tried at first to enter by the roof."

"When I built the Heavenly Bower," replied Landlord Ortigies; "I
meant to place a door up there, but there wasn't anybody in New
Constantinople with enough sense to know how to do it. I 'spose you
was looking fur it, stranger.