It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful of our effects and two of his wife’s relatives to lend him a hand.  The elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.  With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted.  Soon the assayer’s office was thronged with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor.  There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga.  There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.  The Silverado problem was scarce solved.

Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even, if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress.  They thought it “real funny” about the stove-pipe they had forgotten; “real funny” that they should have lost a plate.  As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till they should have supped.  See how late they were!  Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started.  But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.

So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.  We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among boxes.  A single candle lighted us.  It could scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.  Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.  It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm shining of to-morrow’s sun.

But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.