"Gold! Ye kain't hide hit an' ye kain't find hit an' ye kain't dig hit
up an' ye kain't keep hit down. Miss Molly, gal, I like ye, but how I do
wish't ye was a man, so's you an' me could celerbrate this here fitten!"

"Listen!" said the girl. "Our bugle! That's Assembly!"

"Yes, they'll all be there. Come when ye kin. Hell's a-poppin' now!"

The emigrants, indeed, deserted their wagons, gathering in front of the
stockade, group after group. There was a strange scene on the far-flung,
unknown, fateful borderlands of the country Senator McDuffie but now had
not valued at five dollars for the whole. All these now, half-way
across, and with the ice and snow of winter cutting off pursuit for a
year, had the great news which did not reach publication in the press of
New York and Baltimore until September of 1848. It did not attain notice
of the floor of Congress until December fifth of that year, although
this was news that went to the very foundation of this republic; which,
indeed, was to prove the means of the perpetuity of this republic.

The drunken hunters in their ragged wools, their stained skins, the
emigrants in their motley garb--come this far they knew not why, since
men will not admit of Destiny in nations--also knew not that they were
joying over the death of slavery and the life of the Union. They did not
know that now, in a flash, all the old arguments and citations over
slavery and secession were ancient and of no avail. The wagoners of the
Sangamon, in Illinois, gathered here, roistering, did not know that they
were dancing on the martyr's grave of Lincoln, or weaving him his crown,
or buying shot and shell for him to win his grievous ordeal, brother
against brother. Yet all those things were settled then, beyond that
range of the Rockies which senators had said they would not spend a
dollar to remove, "were they no more than ten feet high."

Even then the Rockies fell. Even then the great trains of the covered
wagons, driven by men who never heard of Destiny, achieved their places
on the unwritten scroll of Time.

The newcomers from beyond the Sierras, crazed with their easy fortune,
and now inflamed yet further by the fumes of alcohol, even magnified the
truth, as it then seemed. They spent their dust by the handful. They
asked for skillets, cooking pans, that they could wash more gold. They
wanted saws, nails, axes, hammers, picks. They said they would use the
wagon boxes for Long Toms. They said if m