bash, and mothers sat singing by the
camp-fires, knitting and rocking their babies in their sugar-troughs.

Down in the Howling Wilderness I am bound to say the carousing began
early, and with a vigor that promised more headaches than the camp had
known since the Widow first set foot in the Forks.

Little Half-a-pint was toasted and talked of in every corner of the
house. Was it a girl or was it a boy? Why had they not asked so simple
and so civil a question? They called for Limber Tim--they would appeal
to him. But Limber Tim was not to be found in all the manifold depths of
the Howling Wilderness. He had had his carouse, and was now playing
sober Indian. In fact, he was hanging very close about the little
rocking cradle up in the front room of the Widow's cabin. Never was the
cradle allowed to rest, but rock, rock, till the Widow and Sandy too
were both made very sensible, sleeping or waking, that little
Half-a-pint, small as it was, was filling up the biggest half of the
house.

Nearly midnight it was when Limber Tim, leaning over the cradle and
looking, or pretending to look, at the baby, said to Bunker Hill, who
bent down over it on the other side, "Pretty, ain't it?"

"Guess it is. Looks just like its father for the world." And little
hump-backed Bunker Hill began to make faces, and to shake her head and
nod it up and down, and coo and crow to little Half-a-pint as if it was
really able to hear, and understand, and answer all she said to it.

Down at the saloon all this time the spirits flowed like water. The
cinnamon-haired fellow had fallen upon a harvest, and was making the
most of it. He had laid off his coat, run his two hands up through his
hair till it stood up like forked flames, and was thumping the glasses
as if in feats of legerdemain. How he did score with the charcoal on the
hewn logs behind. He marked and scored that night till the wall behind
him looked as if it might be the Iliad written in Greek, or all the
characters on the obelisk of Saint Peter's.

Yet with all this happiness on the hill, and this merry-making under the
hill, in the heart of the Sierras, in commemoration and celebration of
the beginning of a new race in a new land, there was one man back in the
corner of the saloon who looked on with something of a sneer on his
hard, hatchet face, and who refused to take any part. Now and then this
man would lift up his left hand, hold out his fingers and count, one,
two, three, four, fiv