第14章 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO(2)

At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.Kelmar and his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner? Not they! Put up the horses? Never.Let us attach them to the verandah by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that blustering day.And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irresponsible like children.Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy.Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread.He was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk.If the boy said there was "a hole there in the hill" - a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less - Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole.For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.

However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.That was the site of Silverado mining town.

A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend SILVERADO HOTEL.Not another sign of habitation.Silverado town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.

It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague voice of the wind.Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.

Mrs.Hanson was at home alone, we found.Rufe had been out after a "bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear whither.Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the mountain.We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.But this, somehow, was not to Kelmar's fancy.He first proposed that we should "camp someveres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house with the Hansons.Mrs.

Hanson had been, from the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.But Kelmar was not to be put by.He edged Mrs.Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel.

Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.For about a furlong we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height.A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the mountain.

The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.These led us round the farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain.Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house.

Fanny and I dashed at the house.It consisted of three rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a different side and level.Not a window-sash remained.