In a Hollow of the Hills | Page 5

than ten minutes, Uncle Dick," protested
the pleasant voice.
"All right, my son; go down there if you like and fetch out your Witch
of Endor, but as for me, I'm going to throw myself the other side of
Collinson's lights. They're good enough for me, and a blamed sight
more stationary!"
The grade was very steep, but they took it, California fashion, at a
gallop, being genuinely good riders, and using their brains as well as
their spurs in the understanding of their horses, and of certain natural
laws, which the more artificial riders of civilization are apt to overlook.
Hence there was no hesitation or indecision communicated to the
nervous creatures they bestrode, who swept over crumbling stones and
slippery ledges with a momentum that took away half their weight, and
made a stumble or false step, or indeed anything but an actual collision,
almost impossible. Closing together they avoided the latter, and
holding each other well up, became one irresistible wedge-shaped mass.
At times they yelled, not from consciousness nor bravado, but from the
purely animal instinct of warning and to combat the breathlessness of
their descent, until, reaching the level, they charged across the gravelly
bed of a vanished river, and pulled up at Collinson's Mill. The mill
itself had long since vanished with the river, but the building that had
once stood for it was used as a rude hostelry for travelers, which,
however, bore no legend or invitatory sign. Those who wanted it, knew
it; those who passed it by, gave it no offense.
Collinson himself stood by the door, smoking a contemplative pipe. As
they rode up, he disengaged himself from the doorpost listlessly,

walked slowly towards them, said reflectively to the leader, "I've been
thinking with you that a vote for Thompson is a vote thrown away,"
and prepared to lead the horses towards the water tank. He had parted
with them over twelve hours before, but his air of simply renewing a
recently interrupted conversation was too common a circumstance to
attract their notice. They knew, and he knew, that no one else had
passed that way since he had last spoken; that the same sun had swung
silently above him and the unchanged landscape, and there had been no
interruption nor diversion to his monotonous thought. The wilderness
annihilates time and space with the grim pathos of patience.
Nevertheless he smiled. "Ye don't seem to have got through coming
down yet," he continued, as a few small boulders, loosened in their
rapid descent, came more deliberately rolling and plunging after the
travelers along the gravelly bottom. Then he turned away with the
horses, and, after they were watered, he reentered the house. His guests
had evidently not waited for his ministration. They had already taken
one or two bottles from the shelves behind a wide bar and helped
themselves, and, glasses in hand, were now satisfying the more
imminent cravings of hunger with biscuits from a barrel and slices of
smoked herring from a box. Their equally singular host, accepting their
conduct as not unusual, joined the circle they had comfortably drawn
round the fireplace, and meditatively kicking a brand back at the fire,
said, without looking at them:--
"Well?"
"Well!" returned the leader, leaning back in his chair after carefully
unloosing the buckle of his belt, but with his eyes also on the
fire,--"well! we've prospected every yard of outcrop along the Divide,
and there ain't the ghost of a silver indication anywhere."
"Not a smell," added the close-shaven guest, without raising his eyes.
They all remained silent, looking at the fire, as if it were the one thing
they had taken into their confidence. Collinson also addressed himself
to the blaze as he said presently: "It allus seemed to me that thar was
something shiny about that ledge just round the shoulder of the spur,

over the long canyon."
The leader ejaculated a short laugh. "Shiny, eh? shiny! Ye think THAT
a sign? Why, you might as well reckon that because Key's head, over
thar, is gray and silvery that he's got sabe and experience." As he spoke
he looked towards the man with a pleasant voice. The fire shining full
upon him revealed the singular fact that while his face was still young,
and his mustache quite dark, his hair was perfectly gray. The object of
this attention, far from being disconcerted by the comparison, added
with a smile:--
"Or that he had any silver in his pocket."
Another lapse of silence followed. The wind tore round the house and
rumbled in the short, adobe chimney.
"No, gentlemen," said the leader reflectively, "this sort o' thing is
played out. I don't take no more stock in that cock-and-bull story about
the lost Mexican mine. I don't catch on to