Shadows of Shasta

by Joaquin Miller

And the man was not so exclusive now. The tunnel was now no secret. It was spoken of now with derision, only to be laughed at.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten years! The man has grown old. He is bent and gray. But his faith, which the few remaining miners call a madness, is still unbroken. Yet it is not in human nature to endure all this agony of suspense, all this hope deferred from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, and still be human. The man has, in some sense, become a brute. He now is seen to reel and totter to his cabin, late at night oftentimes. He has at last fallen into the habit of the camp. He can drink, gamble, carouse, as late as the latest.

Now and then, it is true, he has his sober spells, and all the good of his great nature is to the surface. Now he takes up a map and diagram which is hidden under the broad stone of the hearth, and examines it, measures and makes calculations by the hour at night, when all the camp is, or ought to be, asleep.

Maybe it is the placing and displacing of this great stone that has given rise to the story in the camp that the old man is not so poor as he pretends. Maybe some of the rough men who hang about the camp have watched him through the chink-holes in the wretched cabin some night, and decided that it is gold which he keeps concealed under the great hearthstone.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years! The man's hair is long and hangs in strings. It is growing gray, almost white. Some men have been trying to get into the bent old man's cabin at night to find the buried treasure. The old man's double-barreled shot-gun has barked in their faces; and there has been a thinly attended funeral. The camp is low, miserable. The tide is out. Wrecks of rockers, toms, sluices, flumes, derricks, battered pans, tom-irons, cradles, old cabin, strew the sandy strand.

This last act has left the old man utterly alone; yet he is seen even more frequently than before at the "Deadfall." Is he trying to forget that man had died at his hand?

Now and then you see him leading a tawny boy about, and talking in a low, tender way of better things than his life and appearance would indicate. The man is still on the down grade. And yet how long he has been on this decline! One would say he should be at the bottom by this time.

When we reflect how very far a man can fall, we can estimate something of the height in which he stands when fresh from his Maker's hand.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years! The iron-gray hair is white as the snow on the mountain-tops that environ him. The tall man is bent as a tree is bent when the winter snow lies heavily on its branches. The tawny boy is grown a man now. This is John Logan, the fugitive. The two homeless children have long since taken his place.

And still the pick clangs on in that dark, damp tunnel that is always dripping, dripping, dripping, where it looks out at the glaring day, as if in eternal tears for the wasted life within. Yet now there is hope.