VIII
Death Valley! Surrounded by ragged, jagged peaks, floored with ashes, borax, sandsoap, dutch-cleanser, watered by arsenic springs, swept by furnace blasts, it was, indeed, an unpleasant place. “The lid of h—ll,” a profane prospector had called it.
Yet there, in a rude shack on the sloping mountain side, overhung by an impending mass of loose rock, from which ever and anon gigantic fragments detached themselves to roll with a booming crash into the valley below, missing the cabin only by inches, dwelt Magdalene Virey and Elliott, her husband.
She was a woman of noble proportions, though frail—at least she had been on one occasion. She suffered from insomnia because Elliott spent his nights in the mass of rocks above the cabin, detaching great boulders and rolling them down with a booming crash into the valley below, trying to frighten his wife to death.
Elliott did not love his wife and he was a very disagreeable man. He was, perhaps, a little mad, but his wife never got that way. She had a very sweet forgiving nature. The great boulders always narrowly missed the tiny cabin. They bounded over, knocking the top off the chimney, and she had to rebuild it every morning. But the sad-eyed saint never complained.