“Yea, and furthermore, when the incensed people would hae wipet out the while tribe of White Beaver, who dashed at the mob wi’ the roars of a bull-bison forcin’ them to hear that the squaw was crazed from the death of her own bit bairn, and but tryin’ to comfort her sore heart?  Who, I’m askin’ ye?” and from each man’s lips came the murmur like a response to a litany: 

“Charlie Price.”

From the open door a cool dawn breeze blew in from the Sierras, pure forerunner to the new day.  It whirled the heavy smoke plumes into forms of vanished ghosts, like the tortured figments of each man’s conscience who had done, and “left undone” that which it was forever too late to amend.

The sheriff walked in.

“This boy says that old Charlie is gone.”  He stood with his broad hat off, running his fingers nervously through his hair.  “Gentlemen — I — I must confess — I heard the poor man calling, but — "

“Mon, in an ancient book named ‘Mr. Aesop, His Fables,’ there was a tale of the lad who cried ‘wolf.’  Many there are here who have read it.  Come, let us gae after poor Charlie.”

In the first daylight they reached the tree with its gruesome burden.

“But — but,” sputtered the keen-eyed little Irishman, “’Tis not Charlie at all!  ’Tis but an effigy dressed in Charlie’s clothes and hung at the Widow Schmitt’s gate.”

“As a warnin’ to him frae some mutton-head lover of hers.”

They ran as one man across the road to Charlie’s cabin.  It was empty.

“He was callin’ ’Help’,” said the round-eyed boy.

“Yes, we heard him,” added the sheriff.

They had come up the road.  They started back down the trail.

* * * * *

Charlie had got nearly home when he began to worry about a deep prospect hole near the trail known as “Rosenhammer’s Shaft.”  He must be careful to avoid it.  Suddenly his foot slipped on a pebble.  He clutched unavailingly at a manzanita and rolled into a circle of inky blackness.  Rosenhammer’s Shaft!  Now he was lost, indeed.

But, no.  As he slid he came against a sturdy live-oak bush which he clutched, managing to stop his descent into the next world for the time being.  He even, swung one leg over a wiry limb, and there he clung, puttering sailors’ argot, considering his sins, and roaring for help in his best fortissimo tone.

The shaft was said to be a hundred feet deep.  It was filled part way with oily water, and inhabited by snakes and monsters of the subterranean deeps.  People had fallen in and drowned, and had been known never to rise again.  The ghost of a Chinaman who had been murdered and flung down, was said to float up from its depths at night to range the earth, seeking the perpetrator of the fiendish deed.

Charlie wished that he had led a more blameless life that he had not so thoroughly beaten the Indian who had sold him a salted mine; that he had not made Lizzie plow; that, above all, he had married the Widow Schmitt when she had so plainly shown her liking for him.