"Oh! I washed my shirt to-day and got in bed to let it dry."
"Why! Haven't you got but the one shirt?"
"But the one shirt! No! Do you think a man wants a thousand shirts?"
These men were mostly shy with their letters and their tales of love. That was sacred ground, upon which no strange, rude feet could pass. No gold-hunter there, perhaps, but had his love—his one only love, without a chance or possibility of changing the object of his devotion, even if he had desired it. Men must love as well as women. It is the most natural and, consequently, the most proper thing on earth. Imagine how intensified and how tender a man's devotion would become under circumstances like these. The one image in his heart, the one hope—Her. So much time to think, bending to the work in the running water under the trees, on the narrow trail beneath the shadows of the forest, by the camp and cabin-fire, her face and hers only, with no new face rising up, crossing his path, confronting him for days, for months, for years—see how holy a thing his love would grow to be. This, you observe, is a new man, a new manner of lover. Love, I say, is a requirement, a necessity. It is as necessary for a complete man to love as it is for him to breathe pure air. And it is as natural.
These men, being so far removed from any personal contact with the objects of their affections, and only now and then at long intervals receiving letters, all marked and remarked across the backs from the remailings from camp to camp, of course knew of no interruptions in the current of their devotion, and loved in a singularly earnest and sincere way. I doubt if there be anything like it in history.
When men go to war, they have the glory and excitement of battle to allure them, then the eyes of many women are upon them; they are not locked up like these men of the Sierras, with only their work and the one thing to think of. When they go to sea, sailors find new faces in every port; but these men, from the time they crossed the Missouri or left the Atlantic coast, had known no strange gods, hardly heard a woman's voice, till they returned.
But let us return to this one firm first woman, who had come into camp and taken at once upon her shoulders the task of washing and mending the miners' clothes.
Men, even the most bloated and besotted, walked as straight as possible up the trail that led by the Widow's cabin, as they passed that way at night; and kept back their jokes and war-whoops till far up the creek and out of her hearing in the pines.
A general improvement was noticed in all who dwelt in sight or hearing of her cabin. In fact, that portion of the creek became a sort of West End, and cabin rent went up in that vicinity. Men were made better, gentler. No doubt of that. If, then, one plain woman, rude herself by nature, can do so much, what is not left for gentle and cultured woman, who is or should be the true missionary of the West—the world?
A woman's weakness is her strength.