They found him there the next morning, very wet, very cold, but no longer hungry.  He had apparently entered the cemetery gate—­hoping, perhaps, that it led to a house where there was no dog—­and gone blundering about in the darkness, falling over many a grave, no doubt, until he had tired of it all and given up.  The little body lay upon one side, with one soiled cheek upon one soiled hand, the other hand tucked away among the rags to make it warm, the other cheek washed clean and white at last, as for a kiss from one of God’s great angels.  It was observed—­though nothing was thought of it at the time, the body being as yet unidentified—­that the little fellow was lying upon the grave of Hetty Parlow.  The grave, however, had not opened to receive him.  That is a circumstance which, without actual irreverence, one may wish had been ordered otherwise.

THE NIGHT-DOINGS AT “DEADMAN’S” A STORY THAT IS UNTRUE

It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond.  Clear nights have a trick of being keen.  In darkness you may be cold and not know it; when you see, you suffer.  This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent.  The moon was moving mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific.  The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray.  The spray was sunlight, twice reflected:  dashed once from the moon, once from the snow.

In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp were obliterated, (a sailor might have said they had gone down) and at irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles which had once supported a river called a flume; for, of course, “flume” is flumen.  Among the advantages of which the mountains cannot deprive the gold-hunter is the privilege of speaking Latin.  He says of his dead neighbor, “He has gone up the flume.”  This is not a bad way to say, “His life has returned to the Fountain of Life.”

While putting on its armor against the assaults of the wind, this snow had neglected no coign of vantage.  Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army.  In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does so.  You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall.  The devious old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it.  Squadron upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly pursuit had ceased.  A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman’s Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine.  Yet Mr. Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the sole inhabitant.