aims were not only deserted, but "Tuttle's
grocery" had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered,
calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot
each other to death over the bar in the front room. The whole camp
was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing.
Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman
was frequently repeated. It was a name familiar enough in the
camp,--"Cherokee Sal."

Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to
be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman
in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she
most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and
irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear
even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her
loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation
which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so
dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin that, at a
moment when she most lacked her sex's intuitive tenderness and care, she
met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates. Yet
a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings. Sandy
Tipton thought it was "rough on Sal," and, in the contemplation of her
condition, for a moment rose superior to the fact that he had an ace and
two bowers in his sleeve.

It will be seen also that the situation was novel. Deaths were by no
means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing. People had
been dismissed the camp effectively, finally, and with no possibility of
return; but this was the first time that anybody had been introduced AB
INITIO. Hence the excitement.

"You go in there, Stumpy," said a prominent citizen known as "Kentuck,"
addressing one of the loungers. "Go in there, and see what you kin do.
You've had experience in them things."

Perhaps there was a fitness in the selection. Stumpy, in other climes,
had been the putative head of two families; in fact, it was owing to
some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp--a city of
refuge--was indebted to his company. The crowd approved the choice, and
Stumpy was wise enough to bow to the majority. The door closed on the
extempore surgeon and midwife, and Roaring Camp sat down outside, smoked
its pipe, and awaited the issue.

The ass