Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/238



I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farm—large, warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean, cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for two free-tongued, noisy Irish-women, who keep a miners' boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in a freight-waggon, are telling the most fearful stories of violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and "stringing," that I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to think that where I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago men were being shot like skunks. At the mining towns up above this nobody is thought anything of who has not killed a man—ie. in a certain set. These women had a boarder, only fifteen, who thought he could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and they gave an absurd account of the