Chapter Sixteen.
A plunge into hot quarters.
“So this is the golden city,” said Dallas, as he and Abel sat, worn out and disconsolate, gazing at a confusion of tents, sheds, and shanties, for it could be called nothing else, on the hither side of a tumbled together waste of snow and ice spreading to right and left. “Is it all a swindle or a dream?”
“I hope it’s a dream,” replied his cousin, limping a step or two, and then seating himself on the sledge which, footsore and weary, he had been dragging for the last few days after they had finally abandoned their raft. “I hope it’s a dream, and that we shall soon wake.”
The big Cornishman took his short pipe out of his mouth, blew a big cloud, looked at his companions, who were asleep rolled up in their blankets, and then at the cousins.
“Oh, we’re wide awake enough, my sons,” he said, “and we’ve got here at last.”
“Yes,” said Dallas bitterly; “we’ve got here, and what next?”
“Make our piles, as the Yankees call it, my lads.”
“Where?” cried Abel. “Why, we had better have stayed and washed gold-dust out of the sand up one of those streams.”