ity in the
ascent, drank fresh draughts of inspiration in this fiery air, extended
their vocabulary, and created new and startling forms of objurgation.
It is recorded that one bibulous stage-driver exhausted description
and condensed its virtues in a single phrase: "Gin and ginger." This
felicitous epithet, flung out in a generous comparison with his favorite
drink, "rum and gum," clung to it ever after.

Such was the current comment on this vale of spices. Like most human
criticism it was hasty and superficial. No one yet had been known to
have penetrated deeply its mysterious recesses. It was still far below
the summit and its wayside inn. It had escaped the intruding foot of
hunter and prospector; and the inquisitive patrol of the county surveyor
had only skirted its boundary. It remained for Mr. Lance Harriott to
complete its exploration. His reasons for so doing were simple. He had
made the journey thither underneath the stage-coach, and clinging to its
axle. He had chosen this hazardous mode of conveyance at night, as the
coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude
the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.

He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers as they already
knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise
to present himself in a newer reputation of a man who had just slain
a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered.
He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the brushing
branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely
distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road. Then,
more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the
steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness
and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed,
it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any
semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous reddish mask of dust and
clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated
in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken
man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust
followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments
clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened and upheld
by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he kept on his
course.

Gradually t