In the shadow of a spur of wooded mountains, lay a narrow strip of land which might by comparison be called flat. It was lower than the bald mountains which were at its back, so the melted snows of last winter had trickled into it, until the whole place was a damp, miserable bog, through the centre of which the waters had worn themselves a bed, and made a creek.
There were many such bogs and many such creeks about the foothills of the bald mountains, but these were for the most part hidden by an abundant growth of pine, or adorned by a wealth of long grass and the glory of yellow lily and blue larkspur. But this bog was less fortunate than its fellows. Gold had been found in the creek which ran through it, so that instead of the spring flowers and the pines, there were bare patches of yellow mud, stumps rough and untrained where trees had stood, tunnels in the hillside, great wooden gutters mounted high in the air to carry off the stream from its bed and pour it into all manner of unexpected places, piles of boulders and rubbish, so new and unadorned by weed or flower that you knew instinctively that nature had had no hand in their arrangement.
And everywhere amongst this brutal digging and hewing there were new log huts, frame shanties, wet untidy tents, and shelters made of odds and ends, shelters so mean that an African Bushman would have turned up his nose at them. Instead of the telegraph and telephone wires that run overhead in ordinary cities, there were in the mining camp innumerable flumes, long wooden boxes or gutters, to carry water from point to point. These gutters were everywhere. They ran over the tops of the houses, they came winding down for miles along precipitous side-hills, and they ran recklessly across the main street; for traffic there was none in those days, or at any rate none which could not step over, or would not pass round the miners' ditch. In 1862 rights of way were disregarded up in Cariboo, but an inch of water if it could be used for gold-washing was a matter of much moment.
"I say, Ned, this looks more like a Chinese camp than a white man's, doesn't it?" remarked Steve with a shudder.
"What did you expect, Steve,—a second San Francisco?"
"Not that; but this place looks so dead and seems so still."
"Silence, they say, is the criterion of pace," quoted Ned; "but I can hear the noise of the rockers and the rattle of the gravel in the sluices. It looks to me as if men were at work here in grim earnest.—Good-day. How goes it, sir?"
The last part of Corbett's speech was addressed to a man of whom he just caught sight at that moment, standing in a deep cutting by the side of the trail, and busily employed in shovelling gravel into a sluice-box at his side.
"Day," grunted the miner, not pausing to lift his head to look at the man who addressed him until he had finished his task.
"Are things booming here still?" asked Chance.