On the sixth
day, still not hearing from him, she quoted Scripture, spoke of a
seventy-times-seven forgiveness, and went generally into mild
hysterics. On the seventh, she left in the morning train for Sandy
Bar.
And really I don't know as I have anything more to tell. I dined
with them recently, and, upon my word, a more decorous, correct,
conventional, and dull dinner I never ate in my life.
"WHO WAS MY QUIET FRIEND?"
"Stranger!"
The voice was not loud, but clear and penetrating. I looked vainly
up and down the narrow, darkening trail. No one in the fringe of
alder ahead; no one on the gullied slope behind.
"O! stranger!"
This time a little impatiently. The California classical vocative,
"O," always meant business.
I looked up, and perceived for the first time on the ledge, thirty
feet above me, another trail parallel with my own, and looking down
upon me through the buckeye bushes a small man on a black horse.
Five things to be here noted by the circumspect mountaineer.
FIRST, the locality,--lonely and inaccessible, and away from the
regular faring of teamsters and miners.
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