Well, it did not matter much.  He would fall in forty feet of water and they would never find him.  He wished that he had drunk that which the jug contained.  It was growing daylight.  What was the day, then, to him?  He would never live to see it.  His arms were numb.  He must soon let go and fall to his doom.

He heard voices but was too spent to call out.  As a crowd of men came running over the hill, his arms were slipping — slipping.  It was almost broad day.

He made one last, herculean effort to hold fast, turning his head over his shoulder to glance into the deathtrap below and — just as his repentant rescuers reached him, he gave a disgusted snort and fell — three feet to the bottom of the hole!

In the darkness he had safely passed the Rosenhammer shaft and had fallen into the six-feet-deep prospect hole of his own claim.

Two days later, Charlie married the Widow Schmitt

“Rattlesnake Dick”

IV

“Again swings the lash on the high mountain trail,
And the pipe of the packer is scenting the gale;
For the trails are all open, the roads are all free,
And the highwayman’s whistle is heard on the lea.”

- Bret Harte.

We were riding one day under the Digger pines, down an abandoned old road toward Mountaineer House.  As usual, my spirited half-Arab, as white as she was fleet, had put me far in the lead.  She loved a race as well as I did, but she ran it to suit herself.  If I tried to interpose any theories of my own, she calmly took the bit in her teeth and after that I devoted most of my energies to hanging on!

Mammy Kate, own daughter of Nancy Gooch of Coloma, would scold when I came home with torn skirt and a bump on my forehead:  “Now, den, look at dat chile!  Been hoss-racin’ agin su’ah as Moses was in Egypt!  I shall suttenly enjine yo’ fathah to done gin’ yo’ plow-hoss to ride so yo’s gwi’ git beat wiff yo’ racin’, and quit.  Spects yo’ had ’nothah tumble, didn’t you’?  You’ wait till Katie gits de camph-fire an’ put on dat haid.”

So did Katie’s scoldings invariably end in renewed pampering of her “chile,” and so did I continue to race every horse in the community and usually to win.

With one small ear laid back to listen for the other horses, little white Flossie flew along the grassy track, darting around the chapparal bushes which had grown up and jumping the fallen tree trunks.  Suddenly we came out of the woods and she shied violently at a man who was digging a fence-post hole, directly in the road.  I always rode Indian fashion without stirrups of any kind, so of course I was catapulted neatly over her head.

“Hello.  Otto,” I said, remaining seated in the road and catching at Floss’ bridle rein, “what have you found?”

Otto was sifting the loose dirt in the hole through eager fingers.

“Hello!  I’ve found some money here in the ground.  I wonder — oh, yes, I’ve heard my mother tell about it!  This was the old pioneer road and it was at this very spot that Rattlesnake Dick and some of his gang held up the Wells-Fargo stage coach and got such a lot of money.  They say there’s still $40,000 buried on Trinity Mountain, half of what was waiting when Rattlesnake Dick got killed.”