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There were shot-guns in rows, their gray barrels looking like so many organ-pipes; sheaves of fishing-rods, from the four-ounce whisp of the brook-trout up to the rigid eighteen-ounce lance of the king-salmon and sea-bass; showcases of wicked revolvers, swelling by calibres into the thirty-eight and forty-four man-killers of the plainsmen and Arizona cavalry; hunting knives and dirks, and the slender steel whips of the fencers; files of Winchesters, sleeping quietly in their racks, waiting patiently for the signal to speak the one grim word they knew; swarms of artificial flies of every conceivable shade, brown, gray, black, gray-brown, gray-black, with here and there a brisk vermilion note; coils of line, from the thickness of a pencil, spun to hold the sullen plunges of a jew-fish off the Catalina Islands, down to the sea-green gossamers that a vigorous fingerling might snap; hooks, snells, guts, leaders, gaffs, cartridges, shells, and all the entrancing munitions of the sportsman, that savored of lonely canons, deer-licks, mountain streams, quail uplands, and the still reaches of inlet and marsh grounds, gray and cool in the early autumn dawn.
Some day in the near future a railroad will be built "up Elk," and then, while commerce and civilization will get a lift, the loveliest of rivers will be scarred; her trout-streams, carp-runs, bass-pools, salmon-swirls, deer-licks, bear-dens, partridge-nestles, and pheasant-covers will be overrun by sports-men, her magnificent mountains will be scratched bald-headed by lumbermen, her laughing tributaries will be saddened with saw-dust, and her queer, quaint, original boat-pullers and "seng-diggers" will wear shoes in summer-time and coats in winter, weather-board their log cabins, put glass in the windows and partitions across the one room inside.
He raised enough corn to support life; the dense forest around him abounded in every form of feathered game; a little way from his cabin an open glade was full of deer-licks, and an hour or two of idle waiting was generally rewarded by a shot at a fine deer, which would furnish meat for a week, and material for breeches and shoes. His cabin was like that of other pioneers.
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