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Page 36
"No, that's not it? We really have an idea. Now look here."
Mrs. Price "looked here." This process seemed to the superficial
observer to be merely submitting her waist and shoulders to the
arms of her nieces, and her ears to their confidential and coaxing
voices.
Twice she said "it couldn't be thought of," and "it was
impossible;" once addressed Kate as "You limb!" and finally said
that she "wouldn't promise, but might write!"
. . . . . .
It was two days before Christmas. There was nothing in the air,
sky, or landscape of that Sierran slope to suggest the season to
the Eastern stranger. A soft rain had been dropping for a week on
laurel, pine, and buckeye, and the blades of springing grasses and
shyly opening flowers. Sedate and silent hillsides that had grown
dumb and parched towards the end of the dry season became gently
articulate again; there were murmurs in hushed and forgotten
canyons, the leap and laugh of water among the dry bones of dusty
creeks, and the full song of the larger forks and rivers.
Southwest winds brought the warm odor of the pine sap swelling in
the forest, or the faint, far-off spice of wild mustard springing
in the lower valleys. But, as if by some irony of Nature, this
gentle invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance
and discomfort to the haunts and works of man. The ditches were
overflowed, the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift,
and the trails and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud.
The stage-coach from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the
mountain highway, its wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an
unctuous pigment like mud and blood, passed out of it through the
overflowed and dangerous ford, and emerged in spotless purity,
leaving its stains behind with Rough and Ready. A week of enforced
idleness on the river "Bar" had driven the miners to the more
comfortable recreation of the saloon bar, its mirrors, its florid
paintings, its armchairs, and its stove. The steam of their wet
boots and the smoke of their pipes hung over the latter like the
sacrificial incense from an altar. But the attitude of the men was
more critical and censorious than contented, and showed little of
the gentleness of the weather or season.
"Did you hear if the stage brought down any more relations of
Spindler's?"
The barkeeper, to whom this question was addressed, shifted his
lounging position against the bar and said, "I reckon not, ez far
ez I know."
"And that old bloat of a second cousin--that crimson beak--what kem
down yesterday,--he ain't bin hangin' round here today for his
reg'lar pizon?"
"No," said the barkeeper thoughtfully, "I reckon Spindler's got him
locked up, and is settin' on him to keep him sober till after
Christmas, and prevent you boys gettin' at him."
"He'll have the jimjams before that," returned the first speaker;
"and how about that dead beat of a half-nephew who borrowed twenty
dollars of Yuba Bill on the way down, and then wanted to get off at
Shootersvilie, but Bill wouldn't let him, and scooted him down to
Spindler's and collected the money from Spindler himself afore he'd
give him up?"
"He's up thar with the rest of the menagerie," said the barkeeper,
"but I reckon that Mrs. Price hez bin feedin' him up. And ye know
the old woman--that fifty-fifth cousin by marriage--whom Joe
Chandler swears he remembers ez an old cook for a Chinese
restaurant in Stockton,--darn my skin ef that Mrs. Price hasn't
rigged her out in some fancy duds of her own, and made her look
quite decent."
A deep groan here broke from Uncle Jim Starbuck.
"Didn't I tell ye?" he said, turning appealingly to the others.
"It's that darned widow that's at the bottom of it all! She first
put Spindler up to givin' the party, and now, darn my skin, ef she
ain't goin to fix up these ragamuffins and drill 'em so we can't
get any fun outer 'em after all! And it's bein' a woman that's
bossin' the job, and not Spindler, we've got to draw things mighty
fine and not cut up too rough, or some of the boys will kick."
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