He walked to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect.In this listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation, a mere phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in the hills--that left the silence more marked and oppressive.As he turned again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it.It already looked old and decayed.The loneliness of years of desertion seemed to have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in the beams and rafters.To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to a withered and mummied corpse.So it might look in after years when some passing stranger--but he stopped.A dread of the place was beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the long, long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude;summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around that empty shell and voice its desolation.He gathered together hastily a few articles that were especially his own--rather that the free communion of the camp, from indifference or accident, had left wholly to him.He hesitated for a moment over his rifle, but, scrupulous in his wounded pride, turned away and left the familiar weapon that in the dark days had so often provided the dinner or breakfast of the little household.Candor compels me to state that his equipment was not large nor eminently practical.His scant pack was a light weight for even his young shoulders, but I fear he thought more of getting away from the Past than providing for the Future.
With this vague but sole purpose he left the cabin, and almost mechanically turned his steps towards the creek he had crossed that morning.He knew that by this route he would avoid meeting his companions; its difficulties and circuitousness would exercise his feverish limbs and give him time for reflection.He had determined to leave the claim, but whence he had not yet considered.He reached the bank of the creek where he had stood two hours before;it seemed to him two years.He looked curiously at his reflection in one of the broad pools of overflow, and fancied he looked older.
He watched the rush and outset of the turbid current hurrying to meet the South Fork, and to eventually lose itself in the yellow Sacramento.Even in his preoccupation he was impressed with a likeness to himself and his companions in this flood that had burst its peaceful boundaries.In the drifting fragments of one of their forgotten flumes washed from the bank, he fancied he saw an omen of the disintegration and decay of the Lone Star claim.
The strange hush in the air that he had noticed before--a calm so inconsistent with that hour and the season as to seem portentous--became more marked in contrast to the feverish rush of the turbulent water-course.A few clouds lazily huddled in the west apparently had gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent poppies.There was a gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon, washing out the cold snowpeaks, and drowning even the rising moon.The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry.But by some peculiar trick of the atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star mountain.That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim, the gaunt monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening splendor, kept its radiance unquenched long after the glow had fallen from the encompassing skies, and when at last the rising moon, step by step, put out the fires along the winding valley and plains, and crept up the bosky sides of the canyon, the vanishing sunset was lost only to reappear as a golden crown.
The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a momentary picturesque interest.It had been the favorite ground of his prospecting exploits, its lowest flank had been scarred in the old enthusiastic days with hydraulic engines, or pierced with shafts, but its central position in the claim and its superior height had always given it a commanding view of the extent of their valley and its approaches, and it was this practical pre-eminence that alone attracted him at that moment.He knew that from its crest he would be able to distinguish the figures of his companions, as they crossed the valley near the cabin, in the growing moonlight.
Thus he could avoid encountering them on his way to the high road, and yet see them, perhaps, for the last time.Even in his sense of injury there was a strange satisfaction in the thought.
The ascent was toilsome, but familiar.All along the dim trail he was accompanied by gentler memories of the past, that seemed, like the faint odor of spiced leaves and fragrant grasses wet with the rain and crushed beneath his ascending tread, to exhale the sweeter perfume in his effort to subdue or rise above them.There was the thicket of manzanita, where they had broken noonday bread together;here was the rock beside their maiden shaft, where they had poured a wild libation in boyish enthusiasm of success; and here the ledge where their first flag, a red shirt heroically sacrificed, was displayed from a long-handled shovel to the gaze of admirers below.
