CHAPTER I.
THE NEW ARRIVAL AT GOLD CITY.
The stage was late at Gold City. It always was. Everybody knew it, but everybody pretended to expect it on time.
Just exactly as the old court-house bell up the hill struck six, the postmistress hurriedly opened her door and stood anxiously peering up the street, the loafers who had been dozing on the saloon benches shuffled out and leaned up against the posts, the old piano in the Miners' Home began to rattle and a squeaky violin to gasp for breath, while the pompous landlord of the "Palace Hotel," sending a Chinaman to drive away a dozen pigs that had been in front of his door through the day, took his post on the sidewalk to await his coming guests—who generally never came.
There was a time when Gold City had been a great town—
"In days of old,
In days of gold,
In days of forty-nine."
The boys often hung around the saloon steps and listened with gaping mouths while Yankee Sam and the other old men told of the golden age, when the streets of Gold City were crowded and Tom Perry made a fortune in one day and lost it all gambling that night; when there was more life in Gold City than 'Frisco could shake a stick at; when the four quarters of the globe came in on the stage and mined all day, danced all night and went away rich.
But Gold City, now, was neither large nor rich. The same eternal hills surrounded her and the same great pine trees shaded her in summer's heat and hung in white like sentinals of the past in the winter's moonlight. But the sound of other days had died away. The creek bed had long since yielded up its treasure and lay neglected, exposed to the heat and frost. The old brick buildings rambling up the street were still left, but were fast tottering to decay. Side by side with the occupied buildings, stood half-fallen adobes and shattered blocks filled only with the ghosts of other years.
Up on the hill rose the court house, the perfect image of some quaint Dutch church along the Mohawk in York State. Gray and old, changeless it stood, looking down in silent disdain on these California buildings hastening to an early grave. Here and there, hid by pines and vines, up the dusty side-hill roads, one caught glimpses of pretty cottage homes, where dwelt the few who, when the tide had turned, were left stranded in this far-off California mining town.