blustering morning? He set his
face against the snow and started out alone up the corkscrew trail to
try to reach, no one knew where. Or did he try to reach any place at
all? Did he not take this course so that he might leave the mind of the
woman he had loved, free and careless of his fate?

Sandy had promised, and so he had led his new wife to the Parsonage, and
taken possession as he had agreed. But rough as he was he often wished
he had not done so. He could see the hand of his great rival the Parson
in all things around him. Sometimes he almost fancied he could see his
face, mournful, sad, looking in at the window out of the storm at the
happy pair by his hearth-stone.

Early one Autumn some prospectors pushed far up the Fork running
parallel with the trail leading out of camp; and there, in the leaves,
they found a skull. There was a hole in the temple, and the marks of
sharp teeth on the smooth white surface. They also found a small
silver-mounted pistol.

The party came down to the Forks one night, where friends were enjoying
themselves at the saloon. The leader told what they had found, and laid
the pistol on the counter.

It was one of the Parson's little "bull-pups."

The pistol was empty.

One final word of the once genteel Deboon, and we prepare to descend
from the Sierras. Buffeted, beaten down, and blown about, still he
lingered near his old haunts in the Forks.

At last, the broken man, who was now only known as Old Baboon, because
he was so ugly, and twisted, and bent, and crooked, when he had no home,
no mine, no mind, nothing at all, and did not want any thing at all but
a grave, stumbled on to a mine that made him almost a prince in fortune.
He would not leave the Sierras now. He settled there. Here is an extract
from a letter in which he invites a distinguished traveling Yankee
philanthropist and missionary to come to him and make his house his
home. After describing the house and lands, he says:

"The house stands in this wood of pine. We have two California
grizzlies, and a pair of bull-dogs. Sandy keeps the dogs chained, but I
let the grizzlies go free. We are not troubled with visitors."

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE CARAVAN OF DEATH.

The little poet had no place in the heart of the camp at the first. And
now at the last when he was about to go away, he held even a less place
than when he came.

Nobody knew when he came, nobody cared. Now that he was passing away at
last, nobody,