" Yes, I guess we can get you a bite of something; but it will be cold,” is the answer vouchsafed in reply to my query about supper.  Being more concerned these days about the quantity of provisions I can command than the quality, the prospect of a cold supper arouses no ungrateful emotions.  I would rather have a four-pound loaf and a shoulder of mutton for supper now than a smaller quantity of extra choice viands; and I manage to satisfy the cravings of my inner man before leaving the table.  But what about a place to sleep.  For some inexplicable reason these people refuse to grant me even the shelter of their roof for the night.  They are not keeping hotel, they say, which is quite true; they have a right to refuse, even if it is twenty miles to the next place; and they do refuse.  “There’s the empty Chinese bunk-house over there.  You can crawl in there, if you arn’t afeerd of ghosts,” is the parting remark, as the door closes and leaves me standing, like an outcast, on the dark, barren plain.

A week ago this bunk-house was occupied by a gang of Chinese railroaders, who got to quarrelling among themselves, and the quarrel wound up in quite a tragic poisoning affair, that resulted in the death of two, and nearly killed a third.  The Chinese are nothing, if not superstitious, and since this affair no Chinaman would sleep in the bunk-house or work on this section; consequently the building remains empty.  The “spooks” of murdered Chinese are everything but agreeable company; nevertheless they are preferable to inhospitable whites, and I walk over to the house and stretch my weary frame in — for aught I know — the same bunk in which, but a few days ago, reposed the ghastly corpses of the poisoned Celestials.  Despite the unsavory memories clinging around the place, and my pillowless and blanketless couch, I am soon in the land of dreams.  It is scarcely presumable that one would be blessed with rosy-hued visions of pleasure under such conditions, however, and near midnight I awake in a cold shiver.  The snowy mountains rear their white heads up in the silent night, grim and ghostly all around, and make the midnight air chilly, even in midsummer.  I lie there, trying in vain to doze off again, for it grows perceptibly cooler.  At two o’clock I can stand it no longer, and so get up and strike out for Battle Mountain, twenty miles ahead.

The moon has risen; it is two-thirds full, and a more beautiful sight than the one that now greets my exit from the bunk-house it is scarcely possible to conceive.  Only those who have been in this inter-mountain country can have any idea of a glorious moonlight night in the clear atmosphere of this dry, elevated region.  It is almost as light as day, and one can see to ride quite well wherever the road is ridable.  The pale moon seems to fill the whole broad valley with a flood of soft, silvery light; the peaks of many snowy mountains loom up white and spectral; the stilly air is broken by the excited yelping of a pack