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He searched for the trespasser in vain, and told "the boys" that if they called that joking it had grown tiresome. One night he loaded his rifle, and, from a convenient nook, he watched for the intruder. The tamaracks crooned in the wind, the Yuba mumbled in the canon, the Sierras lay in a line of white against the stars.
There were Irishmen, pushin' wheelbarrows; an' Mexicans with burros; an' German miners, an' French, an' English, an' Swedes, ploddin' through the mud across the Sierras with their tools upon their backs; there were organ-grinders an' Jew pedlars, an' women dressed as men, all comin' to Virginia City to claim the gold which I 'ad lost.
The tiny crawling teams each with its puff of dust crawling with it; the great tumbled peaks of the Sierras; the river so far below as to resemble a little stream, the round Cove with its toy houses and its distant ant-like industry all these were plainly to be seized by a glance of whatever eye cared to look.
The sky, and the undulating mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of yellowing purple and rosy gold! The Alameda is a bower of Venus cinctured by Mars.
From the top of each successive mountain ridge the men looked with longing eyes toward the west, hoping to get a sight of the snowy Sierras. Finally want of water and food began to weaken the cattle and the wagons were lightened as much as possible. As the party approached the eastern boundary of California the mountains grew higher and the deserts more arid.
For the blacksmith had recognized it as a stranger to the locality, and as a man of oracular pretension had a startling theory to account for its presence. This he confided to the editor of the local paper, and the next issue contained an editorial paragraph: "Our presage of a severe winter in the higher Sierras, and consequent spring floods in the valleys, has been startlingly confirmed!
Alvar Fanez and Pero Bermudez went their way towards Castille, over sierras and mountains and waters; and they asked where the King was, and it was told them that he was at Valladolid, and thither they went.
With this outlook, and the prospect of change, independence, and all the rich possibilities that to the imagination of youth are included in them, Clarence had found the days dragging. The halt at Salt Lake, the transit of the dreary Alkali desert, even the wild passage of the Sierras, were but a blurred picture in his memory.
From the open door a cool dawn breeze blew in from the Sierras, pure forerunner to the new day. It whirled the heavy smoke plumes into forms of vanished ghosts, like the tortured figments of each man's conscience who had done, and "left undone" that which it was forever too late to amend. The sheriff walked in. "This boy says that old Charlie is gone."
And this went on until a pale opal glow came into the sky, followed by a still paler pink on the summit of the white Sierras, when she rose and hurriedly began to dress. Still so sanguine was her hope of meeting him, that she lingered yet a moment to select the brown holland skirt and yellow sunbonnet she had worn when she first saw him. And she had only seen him twice!
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