than it usually did in the strong summer sunshine. Painted
a cold merciless white, with scant projections for shadows, a roof of
white-pine shingles, bleached lighter through sun and wind, and covered
with low, white-capped chimneys, it looked even more stark and chilly
than the drifts which had climbed its low roadside fence, and yet seemed
hopeless of gaining a foothold on the glancing walls, or slippery,
wind-swept roof. The storm, which had already heaped the hollows of
the road with snow, hurled its finely-granulated flakes against the
building, but they were whirled along the gutters and ridges, and
disappeared in smokelike puffs across the icy roof. The granite outcrop
in the hilly field beyond had long ago whitened and vanished; the dwarf
firs and larches which had at first taken uncouth shapes in the drift
blended vaguely together, and then merged into an unbroken formless
wave. But the gaunt angles and rigid outlines of the building remained
sharp and unchanged. It would seem as if the rigors of winter had only
accented their hardness, as the fierceness of summer had previously made
them intolerable.

It was believed that some of this unyielding grimness attached to Hays
himself. Certain it is that neither hardship nor prosperity had touched
his character. Years ago his emigrant team had broken down in this wild
but wooded defile of the Sierras, and he had been forced to a winter
encampment, with only a rude log-cabin for shelter, on the very verge of
the promised land. Unable to enter it himself, he was nevertheless able
to assist the better-equipped teams that followed him with wood and
water and a coarse forage gathered from a sheltered slope of wild oats.
This was the beginning of a rude "supply station" which afterwards
became so profitable that when spring came and Hays' team were
sufficiently recruited to follow the flood of immigrating gold-seekers
to the placers and valleys, there seemed no occasion for it. His fortune
had been already found in the belt of arable slope behind the wooded
defile, and in the miraculously located coign of vantage on what was now
the great highway of travel and the only oasis and first relief of the
weary journey; the breaking down of his own team at that spot had
not only been the salvation of those who found at "Hays" the means of
prosecuting the last part of their pilgrimage, but later provided the
equipment of returning teams.

The first two years of this experience