CHAPTER I
It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil\'s Ford. The half a
dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some
overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of
fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together on
the narrow gorge of Devil\'s Spur, or cast up on its steep sides. So sudden
and violent had been the change of fortune, that the dwellers in the older
cabins had not had time to change with it, but still kept their old habits,
customs, and even their old clothes. The flour pan in which their daily
bread was mixed stood on the rude table side by side with the "prospecting
pans," half full of gold washed up from their morning\'s work; the front
windows of the newer tenements looked upon the one single thoroughfare,
but the back door opened upon the uncleared wilderness, still haunted by
the misshapen bulk of bear or the nightly gliding of catamount.
Neither had success as yet affected their boyish simplicity and the
frankness of old frontier habits; they played with their new-found riches
with the naive delight of children, and rehearsed their glowing future with
the importance and triviality of school-boys.
"I\'ve bin kalklatin\'," said Dick Mattingly, leaning on his long- handled
shovel with lazy gravity, "that when I go to Rome this winter, I\'ll get one
o\' them marble sharps to chisel me a statoo o\' some kind to set up on the
spot where we made our big strike. Suthin\' to remember it by, you know."
"What kind o\' statoo--Washington or Webster?" asked one of the
Kearney brothers, without looking up from his work.