onry; there were the waterless
ditches, like giant graves, and the pools of slumgullion, now dried into
shining, glazed cement. There were two or three wooden "stores," from
which the windows and doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer
settlement of Wynyard's Gulch. Four or five buildings that still were
inhabited--the blacksmith's shop, the post-office, a pioneer's
cabin, and the old hotel and stage-office--only accented the general
desolation. The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far
beyond the others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with
adobe walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of
half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried pods
in the oven-like heat.

The proprietor of this building, Colonel Swinger, had been looked
upon by the community as a person quite as remote, old-fashioned, and
inconsistent with present progress as the house itself. He was an old
Virginian, who had emigrated from his decaying plantation on the James
River only to find the slaves, which he had brought with him, freed men
when they touched Californian soil; to be driven by Northern progress
and "smartness" out of the larger cities into the mountains, to fix
himself at last, with the hopeless fatuity of his race, upon an already
impoverished settlement; to sink his scant capital in hopeless shafts
and ledges, and finally to take over the decaying hostelry of Buena
Vista, with its desultory custom and few, lingering, impecunious guests.
Here, too, his old Virginian ideas of hospitality were against his
financial success; he could not dun nor turn from his door those
unfortunate prospectors whom the ebbing fortunes of Buena Vista had left
stranded by his side.

Colonel Swinger was sitting in a wicker-work rocking-chair on the
veranda of his hotel--sipping a mint julep which he held in his hand,
while he gazed into the dusty distance. Nothing could have convinced him
that he was not performing a serious part of his duty as hotel-keeper
in this attitude, even though there were no travelers expected, and the
road at this hour of the day was deserted. On a bench at his side Larry
Hawkins stretched his lazy length,--one foot dropped on the veranda,
and one arm occasionally groping under the bench for his own tumbler
of refreshment. Apart from this community of occupation, there was
apparently no interchange of sentiment between the pair. The silence
had continued for