Nell turned sharply at the sound of her name in a voice she remembered full well, but there was no one to be seen, and the cars were speeding on to Roseneath.
CHAPTER XVI
Camp’s Gulch
THE depot at Camp’s Gulch looked as if it were planted on the extreme end of civilization. A person seeing it for the first time might wonder why the railway had been made so far, or why, seeing that it had come so far, it had not been carried farther still.
It was fifteen miles from Bratley, the track following the windings of a valley which, always of sufficient width to allow room for river and rail, broadened in places until it was several miles wide, then narrowed again where the towering hills encroached upon the fertile lowlands.
Very rich were some of those hills in copper ore, veins of silver and gold being seen here and there among great masses of porphyry and granite; while heights of ironstone occurred here and there, that attracted thunderstorms and drew down the lightning, which split and shattered the great boulders as a mammoth battering-ram might have done.
The depot consisted of a water-tank, elevated on four posts, a log-hut divided into two rooms, which were telegraph-office, waiting-room, and everything else combined. Another log-hut, at a few yards’ distance, was the home of the station-master and his wife; and standing close beside the track was a big, strong, well-built shed with great double doors—a properly equipped storehouse, in fact, which often contained valuable merchandise.
Camp’s Gulch was a great base for supplies, and although it looked so desolate, and lay so solitary among the hills, those hills yet teemed with life of a strange, rough sort.
There were even little villages of picturesque wooden houses framed in straggling forests of bull-pines, tall larches, and Douglas firs, hidden away among the hills; and there were great holes and wide caverns in the precipitous sides of the high cliffs, where pockets of copper ore had been worked out by the miner’s pick.
It was to serve these isolated, out-of-sight places that the depot at Camp’s Gulch existed, and two trains every day, except Sunday, brought up stores and carried away minerals from the smelters higher up among the hills.