“Is it far up the valley?” asked Will Osten of the landlord of the last ranche, or inn (a small hovel) in which they had passed the night.
“Not far,” replied the innkeeper, a shrewd intelligent Yankee, with a touch of the nasal tone for which the race is noted; “guess it’s about three leagues off.”
“A wild gloomy sort o’ place, no doubt?” asked Larry.
“Rayther. It’ll stand tamin’ a bit. There’s nobody lives in the whole valley ’xcept a band o’ miners who have been prospectin’ all over it an’ locatin’ themselves in the house without leave.”
“Locatin’, is it?” exclaimed Larry, “faix, it’s vacatin’ it they’ll be, widout so much as ‘by yer lave,’ this night.”
“Have they found much gold, do you know?” asked Will Osten.
“Believe not,” replied the innkeeper. “It’s not a likely place—though there may be some, for gold has been found below this, as you would see, I s’pose, when you passed the diggers on Cocktail Creek.”
Bidding the host good-bye, our hero and his friends rode off to take possession of the estate. They were well armed, for, in these days, might, not right, was the law of the land.
It was evening before they reached the head of the valley where stood the house or wooden cottage which had been the abode of Will’s eccentric old relative. The scenery was savage and forbidding in the extreme. Lofty mountains rose on every side, and only a small portion of the land in the neighbourhood of the dwelling had been brought under cultivation. The house itself was a low long-shaped building, and stood on the banks of a stream which gushed and tumbled furiously along its rocky bed, as if in hot haste to escape from the dark mountain gorges which gave it birth. A hut near by was the residence of an old native who had been the owner’s only servant, and a few cattle grazing in the meadow behind the house were tended by him with as much solicitude as though his late master had been still alive. The only cheering point in the scene was a gleam of ruddy light which shot from a window of the house and lost itself in the deepening gloom of evening.
“A most lugubrious spot,” said Will, surveying it sadly as he rode forward.