DEVIL’S FORD

CHAPTER I

It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil’s Ford.  The half a dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together on the narrow gorge of Devil’s Spur, or cast up on its steep sides.  So sudden and violent had been the change of fortune, that the dwellers in the older cabins had not had time to change with it, but still kept their old habits, customs, and even their old clothes.  The flour pan in which their daily bread was mixed stood on the rude table side by side with the “prospecting pans,” half full of gold washed up from their morning’s work; the front windows of the newer tenements looked upon the one single thoroughfare, but the back door opened upon the uncleared wilderness, still haunted by the misshapen bulk of bear or the nightly gliding of catamount.

Neither had success as yet affected their boyish simplicity and the frankness of old frontier habits; they played with their new-found riches with the naive delight of children, and rehearsed their glowing future with the importance and triviality of school-boys.

“I’ve bin kalklatin’,” said Dick Mattingly, leaning on his long-handled shovel with lazy gravity, “that when I go to Rome this winter, I’ll get one o’ them marble sharps to chisel me a statoo o’ some kind to set up on the spot where we made our big strike.  Suthin’ to remember it by, you know.”

“What kind o’ statoo—­Washington or Webster?” asked one of the Kearney brothers, without looking up from his work.

“No—­I reckon one o’ them fancy groups—­one o’ them Latin goddesses that Fairfax is always gassin’ about, sorter leadin’, directin’ and bossin’ us where to dig.”

“You’d make a healthy-lookin’ figger in a group,” responded Kearney, critically regarding an enormous patch in Mattingly’s trousers.  “Why don’t you have a fountain instead?”

“Where’ll you get the water?” demanded the first speaker, in return.  “You know there ain’t enough in the North Fork to do a week’s washing for the camp—­to say nothin’ of its color.”

“Leave that to me,” said Kearney, with self-possession.  “When I’ve built that there reservoir on Devil’s Spur, and bring the water over the ridge from Union Ditch, there’ll be enough to spare for that.”

“Better mix it up, I reckon—­have suthin’ half statoo, half fountain,” interposed the elder Mattingly, better known as “Maryland Joe,” “and set it up afore the Town Hall and Free Library I’m kalklatin’ to give.  Do that, and you can count on me.”