"Heaven preserve us!" ejaculated the guest, recoiling. "'Tis the Bottomless Pit!"
"Pretty nigh," answered the mountaineer, laughing; "that's fallen five thousand feet. This is not a precipice sheer down, but a peak hollowed out—a cut-off, we say; the Injins say a devil's jump. Stranger, on this side, we shall not be invaded. Now for your tale! Stir up the fire brightly, Bill."
"Yes, for it is a dark and horrid story, gentlemen."
[CHAPTER V.]
THE LONE MAN'S STORY.
"Gentlemen," began the enforced guest of Jim Ridge and the half-breed, "I was born in an Atlantic State, and my earliest memories relate to home events of so little moment now, that I have almost forgotten them. I remember, however, that a number of our young men formed a party and went West, and that the reading of some of their letters home, reflected into my boyish ears, fed the natural longings of one who lived sufficiently remote from the crowded town to know what a lake and the woods are like. Besides, an uncle of mine was said to have gone to the same marvellous backwoods, and I used to be promised a real wild Indian's bow-and-arrows at the least when he should return. All this is common enough in the East. About the year 1850 my mother died, and my father, as much to distract himself in his profound grief as to quench a thirst for fortune which he shared with New Englanders, departed with me, a stripling, around the Cape to California. Our ship was rather better than those rotten tubs which unscrupulous men fitted out as 'superb clippers,' and we outstripped many vessels that had anticipated our start. You must recall something of the sensation due to the startling discovery of gold in the extreme West. Even the fables of old whalers who visited the Pacific Coast, and who really had been blind, were outdone by reality. With indescribable furious madness, people flocked from the world's confines towards a tract hardly laid down in charts. They seemed to have become monsters in human form, as the playbooks say, with no impulse but avarice. We stepped ashore into a field of carnage, though lately a peaceable grazing ground; men sought to remove each other with steel and lead, whilst the few females, the vilest of their sex, freely employed poison. Luckily, these demons slew one another, and left no aftercrop of fiends and furies to blight the Golden State."
"Father and I had no experience in gold seeking, and he saw that money enough awaited an active, acute man, in supplying the returned miners with table delicacies. He was used to fishing, trapping, and gunning, and so we set to killing bears—any quantity on the Sierra Nevada 'spurs' then—and fishing in the Sacramento and San Joaquín. We built a ranche on the banks of the former stream, in a lonely spot, and only went to town to sell game and procure ammunition and other stores."
"One Saturday my father went on this duty, whilst I amused myself with tracking a young grizzly, with the hope of securing him alive, as a hotel keeper wanted a 'native attraction' for his barroom. Unfortunately, a huge grizzly intercepted my course, and wounded me in a scuffle, out of which I thought myself happy to escape so easily; and almost made me lose my prize. However, as this wound stung me in pride as well as flesh—for I daresay, gentlemen, you know how a grizzly's claws leave a smart!" (the two hunters nodded animatedly)—"I pressed on, after a circuit, at the tail of my first 'meat.' I overtook it at dark, had to kill it—it was so stubborn—dressed it, and carried away the paws and choice meat in the hide. The sun was down, and my load was too heavy for me to show much speed, though I believed my father would be impatiently awaiting me."