f have been added. It is
electrically lighted and furnace heated, modern in every way, yet still
the romance of former times seems to cling to its sturdy old walls.

All that remain unchanged are three huge trees flanking the highway in
front. What tales they could tell, if they would, of what passed by the
junction of two roads beneath them. Of the long and weary caravans from
across the plains crawling up from the bridge at Whiskey Bar, below
Rattlesnake, glad that their six months' struggle was nearly over: of
horsemen on beautiful Spanish horses riding furiously, whither no one
knew nor dared ask; of dark deeds in the old stone house below, that
was so inscrutably quiet by day and so mysteriously alive by night; of
ghastly doings by the Tom Bell gang which ranged all the way from the
Oregon border to the southern lakes.

They will never tell all they know--these big old trees--of those
who went in by the door and "came out by the cellar" of Tom Bell's
stronghold. In the end the place fell, in the war between order and
lawlessness and, as the pessimists love to assert, a woman, as usual,
was the cause of it. The tale is told:

Rosa Phillips sat in the Mountaineer House strumming a Spanish guitar,
and singing,

"There's a turned down page, as some writer says, in every human life,
A hidden story of happier days, of peace amidst the strife.
A folded down leaf which the world knows not. A love dream rudely crushed,
The sight of a face that is not forgot. Although the voice be hushed."

She rose and stood at a window, holding the dusty curtain aside with
one white hand and peering cautiously forth into the dusk. A horse was
galloping up the Folsom road. The horseman was near--was under the trees
in front--was past--and gone down the river road without slackening his
animal's rapid gait.

"He does not stop at the Mountaineer House these days," said Tom Bell's
sneering voice at her elbow. "There is a new actress at the opera house
in Rattlesnake."

The woman's dark eyes flashed, but she answered evenly enough:

"He does not stop, the handsome Dick, so you, senor, have not the cause
to be jealous. Is it not so?"

"Cause? Why, you Spanish jade, you've never been the same to me since
Rattlesnake Dick came prowling back from Shasta county to his old haunts
in Placer." Rosa's thin, red lips curled.

"Senor, I am what it pleases me to be."

"And Jack Phillips permits you to be!"

She shrugged her slender shoul