ramento at great expense, were freely offered to his
friends to join in the astounding pageant. A wonderful casket of
iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held the remains of the
ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready. But a more remarkable innovation was
the addition of a royal crown to the other ornamentation of the casket.
Peter Atherly's ideas of heraldry were very vague,--Sacramento at that
time offered him no opportunity of knowing what were the arms of the
Atherlys,--and the introduction of the royal crown seemed to satisfy
Peter's mind as to what a crest MIGHT be, while to the ordinary
democratic mind it simply suggested that the corpse was English!
Political criticism being thus happily averted, Mrs. Atherly's body
was laid in the little cemetery, not far away from certain rude wooden
crosses which marked the burial-place of wanderers whose very names were
unknown, and in due time a marble shaft was erected over it. But
when, the next day, the county paper contained, in addition to
the column-and-a-half description of the funeral, the more formal
announcement of the death of "Mrs. Sallie Atherly, wife of the late
Philip Atherly, second son of Sir Ashley Atherly, of England," criticism
and comment broke out. The old pioneers of Rough and Ready felt that
they had been imposed upon, and that in some vague way the unfortunate
woman had made them the victims of a huge practical joke during all
these years. That she had grimly enjoyed their ignorance of her position
they did not doubt. "Why, I remember onct when I was sorter bullyraggin'
her about mixin' up my duds with Doc Simmons's, and sendin' me Whiskey
Dick's old rags, she turned round sudden with a kind of screech, and ran
out into the brush. I reckoned, at the time, that it was either 'drink'
or feelin's, and could hev kicked myself for being sassy to the
old woman, but I know now that all this time that air critter--that
barrownet's daughter-in-law--was just laughin' herself into fits in the
brush! No, sir, she played this yer camp for all it was worth, year in
and out, and we just gave ourselves away like speckled idiots! and now
she's lyin' out thar in the bone yard, and keeps on p'intin' the joke,
and a-roarin' at us in marble."

Even the later citizens in Atherly felt an equal resentment against her,
but from different motives. That her drinking habits and her powerful
vocabulary were all the effect of her aristocratic alliance they never
doubted. And,