behind, came out with a star.

"How the red star hangs to the moon's white horn."

There was no answer, for his companion was awed to utter silence.

One day, Bunker Hill, a humped-back and unhappy woman of uncertain ways, passed through the crowd in the Forks. Some of the rough men laughed and made remarks. This boy was there also. Lifting his eyes to one of these men at his side, he said:

"God has made some women a little plain, in order that he might have some women that are wholly good."

These things began to be noised about. All things have their culmination. Even the epizootic has one worst day. Things only go so far. Rockets only rise so high, then they explode, and all is dark and still.

The Judge stood straddled out before the roaring fire of the Howling Wilderness one night, tilting up the tails of his coat with his two hands which he had turned in behind him, as he stood there warming the upper ends of his short legs, and listening to these questions and the comments of the men. At last, he seemed to have an inspiration, and tilting forward on his toes, and bringing his head very low down, and his coat-tails very high up, he said, solemnly:

"Fellow-citizens, it's a poet."

Then bringing out his right hand, and reaching it high in the air, as he poised on his right leg:

"In this glorious climate of Californy—"

"Be gad, it is!" cried an Irishman, jumping up, "a Bryan! A poet, a rale, live, Lord O'Bryan."

And so the status of the strange boy was fixed at the Forks. He was declared to be a poet, and was no more a wonder. Curiosity was satisfied.

"It is something to know that it is no worse," growled a very practical old man, as he held a pipe in his teeth and rubbed his tobacco between his palms.

He spoke of it as if it had been a case of the small-pox, and as if he was thinking how to best prevent the spread of the infection.

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST WOMAN IN THE FORKS.

One day Limber Tim came up from the Howling Wilderness, all excitement: all gyrations, and gimlets, and corkscrews. He twisted himself around a sapling—this great, overgrown, six-foot boy without a beard—and shouting down to his "pardner" in the mine, Old Sandy, who stood at the bottom of the open claim, leaning on his pick, resting a moment, looking into the bright bubbling water that burst laughing from the bank before him, dreaming a bit in the freshness about him; and said, "Hallo! I say! a widder's come to town. D'ye hear? A widder; one what's up and up, and on the square."

Sandy only looked up, for he was getting old, and gray, and wrinkled. Then he looked at the silver stream that ran from the bank and through the rocks at his feet, and called to him in the pleasant, balmy sunset, sweet with the smell of fir, and he did not disturb the water again with his pick. It looked too pretty, laughed, and sparkled, and leapt, and made him glad and yet sad.

A poet was this man Sandy, a painter, a sculptor, a mighty moralist; a man who could not write his name.

He laid down his pick, for the sun was just pitching his last lances at the snow-peaks away up yonder above the firs, above the clouds, and night was coming down with steady steps to possess this chasm in the earth.

Limber Tim untwisted himself from the sapling as Sandy came up from the mine, twisting his great shaggy beard with his right hand, while he carried his black slouch hat in his left, and the two sauntered on toward their cabin together, while Sandy's great gum boots whetted together as he walked.

The "Parson" was in a neighboring cabin when it was announced that the first woman had come to the camp. The intelligence was received in a profound silence.

There was a piece of looking-glass tacked up over the fire-place of this cabin.

Old Baldy whistled a little air, and walked up to this glass, sidewise, silently, and stood there smoothing down his beard.

"Ginger blue!" cried the Parson, at last, bounding up from his bench, and throwing out his arms, as if throwing the words from the ends of his fingers. "Ginger blue! hell-ter-flicker!" And here he danced around the cabin in a terrible state of excitement, to the tune of a string of iron-clad oaths that fell like chain-shot. They called him the Parson, because it was said he could outswear any man in the camp, and that was saying a great deal, wonderful as were his achievements in this line.

After the announcement, every one of the ten men there took a look at the little triangular fragment of looking-glass that was tacked up over the fire-place.

The arrival of Eve in Paradise was certainly an event; but she came too early in the world's history to create much sensation.

Stop here, and fancy the arrival of the first woman on earth to-day—in this day of committees, conventions, brass-band receptions, and woman's rights!

You imagine a princess had come to camp, a good angel, with song and harps, or, at the least, carpet-bags, and extended crinoline, waterfalls, and false hair, a pack-train of Saratoga trunks, and all the adjuncts of civilization. Not at all. She had secured a cabin, by some accident, very near to that of the boy poet, and settled down there quietly to go to work.

Yes, Limber Tim had "seed" her. She had ridden the bell mule of the pack-train down the mountain and into town. He told how the hats went up in the air from in and about the Howling Wilderness, and how the boys had gone up in rows to the broken looking-glass in the new barber-shop, and how some had even polished their bowie-knives on their boots, and sat down and tried to see themselves in the shining blade, and adjust their dress accordingly.

In a little time Sandy bent silently over the table in the cabin, and with his sleeves rolled up high on his great hairy arms, and kneaded away at the dough in the gold pan in silence, while Limber Tim wrestled nervously with the frying-pan by the fire.

"Is she purty, Limber?"

"Purty, Sandy? She's purtier nur a spotted dog."

Sandy sighed, for he felt that there was little hope for him, and again fell into a moody silence.

There was a run that night on the little Jew shop at the corner of the Howling Wilderness. Before midnight the little kinky-headed Israelite had not a shirt, collar, or handkerchief, or white fabric of any kind whatever in the shop.

It might have been a bit of first-class and old-fashioned chivalry that had lain dormant in these great hairy breasts, or it might have been their strict regard for the appropriateness of names that made these men at once call her the "Widder;" or it might have been some sudden revelation, a sort of inspiration, given to the first man who saw her as she rode down the mountain into camp, or the first man who spoke of her as she rode blushing through their midst with her pretty face held modestly down; but be all that as it may, certainly there was no design, no delay, no hesitation about it from the first. And yet the appellation was singularly appropriate, and perhaps suggested to this poor, lone little woman, daring to cross the mountains, and to come down into this great chasm of the earth, among utter strangers, the conduct of her life.

The first woman came unheralded. Like all good things on earth, she came quietly as a snowflake down in their midst, without ado or demonstration.

Who she was or where she came from no one seemed to know. Perhaps the propriety of questioning occurred to some of the men of the camp, but it never found expression. I had rather say, however, that when they found there was a real live woman in camp, a decent woman, who was willing to work and take her place beside the men in the great battle—bear her part in the common curse which demands that we shall toil to eat, they quietly accepted the fact, as men do the fact of the baby's arrival, without any question whatever.

This was not really the first woman to come into the