suspiciously idle men.  A dozen rivals of Thompson’s Saloon had sprung up along the narrow main street.  There were two new hotels—­one a “Temperance House,” whose ascetic quality was confined only to the abnegation of whiskey—­a rival stage office, and a small one-storied building, from which the “Sierran Banner” fluttered weekly, for “ten dollars a year, in advance.”  Insufferable in the glare of a Sabbath sun, bleak, windy, and flaring in the gloom of a Sabbath night, and hopelessly depressing on all days of the week, the First Presbyterian Church lifted its blunt steeple from the barrenest area of the flats, and was hideous!  The civic improvements so enthusiastically contemplated by the five millionaires in the earlier pages of this veracious chronicle—­the fountain, reservoir, town-hall, and free library—­had not yet been erected.  Their sites had been anticipated by more urgent buildings and mining works, unfortunately not considered in the sanguine dreams of the enthusiasts, and, more significant still, their cost and expense had been also anticipated by the enormous outlay of their earnings in the work upon Devil’s Ditch.

Nevertheless, the liberal fulfilment of their promise in the new house in the suburbs blinded the young girls’ eyes to their shortcomings in the town.  Their own remoteness and elevation above its feverish life kept them from the knowledge of much that was strange, and perhaps disturbing to their equanimity.  As they did not mix with the immigrant women—­Miss Jessie’s good-natured intrusion into one of their half-nomadic camps one day having been met with rudeness and suspicion—­they gradually fell into the way of trusting the responsibility of new acquaintances to the hands of their original hosts, and of consulting them in the matter of local recreation.  It thus occurred that one day the two girls, on their way to the main street for an hour’s shopping at the Villa de Paris and Variety Store, were stopped by Dick Mattingly a few yards from their house, with the remark that, as the county election was then in progress, it would be advisable for them to defer their intention for a few hours.  As he did not deem it necessary to add that two citizens, in the exercise of a freeman’s franchise, had been supplementing their ballots with bullets, in front of an admiring crowd, they knew nothing of that accident that removed from Devil’s Ford an entertaining stranger, who had only the night before partaken of their hospitality.

A week or two later, returning one morning from a stroll in the forest, Christie and Jessie were waylaid by George Kearney and Fairfax, and, under pretext of being shown a new and romantic trail, were diverted from the regular path.  This enabled Mattingly and Maryland Joe to cut down the body of a man hanged by the Vigilance Committee a few hours before on the regular trail, and to remonstrate with the committee on the incompatibility of such exhibitions with a maidenly worship of nature.