The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS

The scene of this little book is on a high mountain.  There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.  It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest.  It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude.  It looks down on much green, intricate country.  It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks.  From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.  Three counties, Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders.  Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.

Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and bears, and rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men’s talk.  Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.  And though in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood.

To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo.  Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.

In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.  Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river.  When we made the passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.

South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.  A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human face or voice - these are the marks of South Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.  For that, too, is one of England’s outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with bread.

The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up to labourers, and partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is called in the west a two-bit house: the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence.  In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut.  There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.

Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway, bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses.  More of the bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island opposite.  It told us we were still but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills.  It called to us over the waters as with the voice of a bird.  Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.  Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for England.

For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky.  But by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the sea’s neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley.  A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove, among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday’s best to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.

This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage.  Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.

PART I - IN THE VALLEY

CHAPTER I - CALISTOGA

It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one another.  The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to both - a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk.  Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan.  But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road.  I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway.  Here are the blacksmith’s, the chemist’s, the general merchant’s, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman’s; here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has a paper - they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels, Cheeseborough’s, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.

It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago.  The highway robber - road-agent, he is quaintly called - is still busy in these parts.  The fame of Vasquez is still young.  Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga.  In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.  A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much desultory fighting, in which several - and the dentist, I believe, amongst the number - bit the dust.  The grass was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga.  I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year.  “He had been unwell,” so ran his humorous defence, “and the doctor told him to take something, so he took the express-box.”

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier.  California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.  Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the required point.  Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.  One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three.  This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.

I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into Cheeseborough’s, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.  Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered “Yes.”  Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.  Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night’s grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.  But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilized career.  So it goes in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel - is or was; for since I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes.  A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm before the door.  Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they were the great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.  Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake.  At one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was there.  At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.  It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.  And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the east - rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees - wore dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena.  She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.  She excelled them by the boldness of her profile.  Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hill-tops.

CHAPTER II - THE PETRIFIED FOREST

We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.  The sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume.  Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition.  We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of content.

A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step.  To the right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero’s house in the whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless.  But we had the society of these bright streams - dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine.  And what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open air.

Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees - a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English.  He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned.

At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign upon it like an inn.  “The Petrified Forest.  Proprietor: C. Evans,” ran the legend.  Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed.  It was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.

The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.  He had wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres - I forget how many years ago - all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder.  Long, useless years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick.  Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore.  But at the end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.  And the very sight of his ranche had done him good.  It was “the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains.”  “Isn’t it handsome, now?” he said.  Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.  Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company - or, rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in the valley.  And then, for a last piece of luck, “the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains” had produced a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe and a sciatica.

This tardy favourite of fortune - hobbling a little, I think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the sea - thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the hill behind his house.

“Who first found the forest?” asked my wife.

“The first?  I was that man,” said he.  “I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this” - kicking a great redwood seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.

“Were you surprised?”

“Surprised?  No!  What would I be surprised about?  What did I know about petrifactions - following the sea?  Petrifaction!  There was no such word in my language!  I knew about putrifaction, though!  I thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture.”

And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except that the trees had not “grewed” there.  But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as “tufa” and “scilica” with careless freedom.

When I mentioned I was from Scotland, “My old country,” he said; “my old country” - with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.  I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged him to explain.  It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships.  “Out of Glasgow,” said he, “or Greenock; but that’s all the same - they all hail from Glasgow.” And he was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction - I believe the most beautiful and portable he had.

Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American, acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.  Mr. Wallace’s Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.  I have myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable accents struck me dumb.  But, indeed, I think we all belong to many countries.  And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

And the forest itself?  Well, on a tangled, briery hillside - for the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes - there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one already mentioned.  It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all.  Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved.  Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

“There’s nothing under heaven so blue,
That’s fairly worth the travelling to.”

But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old age.

CHAPTER III - NAPA WINE

I was interested in Californian wine.  Indeed, I am interested in all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Caesar.

Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petraea.  Château Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage - a hermitage indeed from all life’s sorrows - lies expiring by the river.  And in the place of these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the sea.  It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences - for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect - if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!  Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy “took his whack,” like liquorice water.  And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards.  A nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian wines.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also “Prospects.” One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.  This is a failure; that is better; a third best.  So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed.  But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.  The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.  To find one properly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune’s favourite.

Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.

“You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?” a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his premises.  “Well, here’s the reason.”

And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a single department could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.

“Chateau X-?” said I.  “I never heard of that.”

“I dare say not,” said he.  “I had been reading one of X-‘s novels.”

They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States.

Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.  The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the faggots.

A Californian vineyard, one of man’s outposts in the wilderness, has features of its own.  There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low côte d’or, or the infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.  We visited two of them, Mr. Schram’s and Mr. M’Eckron’s, sharing the same glen.

Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south and plunged into the thick of the wood.  A rude trail rapidly mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom.  The last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some moment.  For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious.

The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.  Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M’Eckron’s head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.  No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.

Mr. M’Eckron’s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself.  He had but recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds.  He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would fancy.

Mr. Schram’s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.  Now, his place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit’s cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.  Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting wines in the cellar.  To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.  I tasted all.  I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more.  Much of it goes to London - most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste.

In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.  It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind.  Here, also, earth’s cream was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley.  So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass.

But these are but experiments.  All things in this new land are moving farther on: the wine-vats and the miner’s blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods!  This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the land.  Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander.  As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we drove by.

CHAPTER IV - THE SCOT ABROAD

A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.  Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except upon the map.  Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America.  When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner.  Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant.  It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.  I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.  When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England.  But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.  An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.

“From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”

And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.

Only a few days after I had seen M’Eckron, a message reached me in my cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few words to each other; we had not much to say - should never have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all.

Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect - like a whiff of peats.

And there was yet another.  Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder of the kirk.  He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.

“Hullo, sir!” I cried.  “Where are you going?”

He turned round without a quiver.

“You’re a Scotchman, sir?” he said gravely.  “So am I; I come from Aberdeen.  This is my card,” presenting me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains.  “I was just examining this palm,” he continued, indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, “which is the largest spacimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia.”

There were four or five larger within sight.  But where was the use of argument?  He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.  He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were due between countrymen; shook hands with me, “for add lang syne,” as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.

A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to Sacramento - perhaps from Aberdeen.  Anyway, there never was any one more Scotch in this wide world.  He could sing and dance, and drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.  All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes.  This is a very sad story.  After he had borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.

I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.

It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world.  But perhaps these two are cause and effect: “For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

PART II - WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL

CHAPTER I. - TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR

One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and that is the number of antiquities.  Already there have been many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind them relics.  These, standing on into changed times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower.  The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.  I suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in California.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages.  Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses.  But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.

It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.  There is something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made house.  And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter’s existence would be solved.  Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone.  Fresh meat must be had on an occasion.  It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.  To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.

It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this life.  “Mihi est propositum,” as you may see by the motto, “id quod regibus;” and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour rolling in cattle.

Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar.  That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name among the angels.  Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men.  He also had something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.  He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked.  Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.

I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important person Kelmar was.  But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the rural population.  Credit is offered, is pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave.  I believe, even from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles round Calistoga.  These are continually paying him, but are never suffered to get out of debt.  He palms dull goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern days, their king.

For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and was proportionately sad.  One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed in smiles.  He had found the very place for me - Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain.  Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us - fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides.  Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain’t it?  In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on purpose.

He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.  There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest - there was Silverado.  The name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more.  I began to inquire with some eagerness.  It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a great place.  The mine - a silver mine, of course - had promised great things.  There was quite a lively population, with several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store, and done extremely well - “Ain’t it?” he said, appealing to his wife.  And she said, “Yes; extremely well.” Now there was no one living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe’s praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.

I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words.  But I was impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in Kelmar’s waggon, I accepted on the spot.  The plan of their next Sunday’s outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.  They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.

CHAPTER II - FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO

We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us of the hour.  But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of ship’s coffee-kettles.  These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence.  Our carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six of us.  Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.  But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.  No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.

The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.  Close at the zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.  The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle.  It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.

For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to be more local, entered on “the grade.”  The road mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County.  In one place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.  Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.

Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with enormous pines.  It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked from the valley.  Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills.  The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees - but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood.  As Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-top their fellow-vegetables.  Alas! if they had left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.  But the redwoods, fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.

A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity.  It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.  The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.  Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the valley.  “I to the hills lift mine eyes!”  There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.

As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.  Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage difficult.  But now we were hard by the summit.  The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.  At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.

A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines.  The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.  In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.  There is just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through the wood.  I said croquet ground, not green; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.

On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.

Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory crowned his arms.

At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.  Kelmar and his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.  For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.  They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles of road before them on the other side?  Stay to dinner?  Not they!  Put up the horses? Never.  Let us attach them to the verandah by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person’s hat on that blustering day.  And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irresponsible like children.  Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy.  Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread.  He was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk.  If the boy said there was “a hole there in the hill” - a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less - Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole.  For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.  Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.

However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.  That was the site of Silverado mining town.  A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar’s store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson’s house, still bearing on its front the legend Silverado Hotel.  Not another sign of habitation.  Silverado town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.

It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague voice of the wind.  Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons’ chicken-house.

Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.  Rufe had been out after a “bar,” had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear whither.  Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar’s coming, and was now ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the mountain.  We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.  But this, somehow, was not to Kelmar’s fancy.  He first proposed that we should “camp someveres around, ain’t it?” waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house with the Hansons.  Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.  So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.  But Kelmar was not to be put by.  He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel.

Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.  For about a furlong we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.  A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height.  A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.  It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the mountain.

The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.  These led us round the farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain.  Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.  The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron; a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house.

Fanny and I dashed at the house.  It consisted of three rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a different side and level.  Not a window-sash remained.

The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.  We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,” and “Funnel No. 2,” but with the tails torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was our first improvement by which we took possession.

The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground.  As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.

The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.

Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not.  In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly audible.  Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill.  It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.  Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain’s flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady’s chamber.  But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that place otherwise than cold and windy.

Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.  I own I had looked for something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at Jerusalem.  Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.  The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain.  The view up the canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of heaven.  Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves gratefully to our senses.  One way and another, now the die was cast.  Silverado be it!

After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of striking forward.  But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down, before their departure, and returned with a ship’s kettle.  Happy Hansons!  Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our installation.

The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the other side of the valley.  Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself.  My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.  I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out.  Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen; and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces.  But for the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads.  So it blew all night long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.

It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful, wandering Hebrews.  We could not suppose they had reached a destination.  The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole.  Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions would be war.  We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o’-the-wisp conductor; and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm.

CHAPTER III. THE RETURN

Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up.  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side.  It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship’s kettles, all but one, had been “placed.”  Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a ship’s kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in the girl’s innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth.

Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk.  They particularly commanded people who were well to do.  “He don’t care - ain’t it?” was their highest word of commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy - it was to be free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless.  The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.

No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time - it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.  Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.  And now it went -

“O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges:”

and again, to a more trampling measure -

“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar.”

The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.  Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her “old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath - on her knees, I think she said - not to employ it otherwise.

This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.

Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it - a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her “the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States.  And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele, “was to fall downstairs.”

At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when - judgment of Heaven! - here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.  So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.  There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till; - these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.  Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith an empty pocket.  “You see, I don’t mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar something.”

Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.  If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother’s mote.

THE ACT OF SQUATTING

There were four of us squatters - myself and my wife, the King and Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.  Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life.  He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of existence.  Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’ laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature.  It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.

The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s team.

It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.

By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither, then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.  Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.

By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun, there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.

Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House - our natural north-west passage to civilization.  I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees.  It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.  There was nowhere any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty miners.  And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine - a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy story.  A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a promising spot for the imagination.  No boy could have left it unexplored.

The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once, I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain.  No wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.

The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.  My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised.  But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.  Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing poker - Well, poker was too many for Rufe.  I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.

The lower room had been the assayer’s office.  The floor was thick with débris - part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all - for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity - and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.  Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious admiration.