Mrs Skaggss Husbands | Page 3

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MRS. SKAGGS'S HUSBANDS
by Bret Harte

CONTENTS
MRS. SKAGGS'S HUSBANDS
HOW SANTA CLAUS CAME TO SIMPSON'S BAR
THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS
THE ILIAD OF SANDY BAR
MR. THOMPSON'S PRODIGAL
THE ROMANCE OR MADRONO HOLLOW
THE POET OF SIERRA FLAT
THE CHRISTMAS GIFT THAT CAME TO RUPERT

MRS. SKAGGS'S HUSBANDS.

PART I--WEST.
The sun was rising in the foot-hills. But for an hour the black mass of
Sierra eastward of Angel's had been outlined with fire, and the
conventional morning had come two hours before with the down coach
from Placerville. The dry, cold, dewless California night still lingered
in the long canyons and folded skirts of Table Mountain. Even on the
mountain road the air was still sharp, and that urgent necessity for
something to keep out the chill, which sent the barkeeper sleepily
among his bottles and wineglasses at the station, obtained all along the
road.

Perhaps it might be said that the first stir of life was in the bar-rooms. A
few birds twittered in the sycamores at the roadside, but long before
that glasses had clicked and bottles gurgled in the saloon of the
Mansion House. This was still lit by a dissipated- looking
hanging-lamp, which was evidently the worse for having been up all
night, and bore a singular resemblance to a faded reveller of Angel's,
who even then sputtered and flickered in HIS socket in an arm-chair
below it,--a resemblance so plain that when the first level sunbeam
pierced the window-pane, the barkeeper, moved by a sentiment of
consistency and compassion, put them both out together.
Then the sun came up haughtily. When it had passed the eastern ridge it
began, after its habit, to lord it over Angel's, sending the thermometer
up twenty degrees in as many minutes, driving the mules to the sparse
shade of corrals and fences, making the red dust incandescent, and
renewing its old imperious aggression on the spiked bosses of the
convex shield of pines that defended Table Mountain. Thither by nine
o'clock all coolness had retreated, and the "outsides" of the up stage
plunged their hot faces in its aromatic shadows as in water.
It was the custom of the driver of the Wingdam coach to whip up his
horses and enter Angel's at that remarkable pace which the woodcuts in
the hotel bar-room represented to credulous humanity as the usual rate
of speed of that conveyance. At such times the habitual expression of
disdainful reticence and lazy official severity which he wore on the box