Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/141

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barricade to the moon. She would not be seen to whisper with you for the world. Yet if she loved you less, she would laugh and talk and whisper by the hour, and think nothing of it. I like such deceit as that. It is natural.

The miners were at work like beavers. Up the stream and down the stream the pick and shovel clanged against the rock and gravel from dawn until darkness came down out of the forests above them and took possession of the place.

The Prince worked on patiently, industriously with the rest, with reasonable success and first-rate promise of fortune. The pent-up energies of the camp were turned loose, and the stream ran thick and yellow with sediment from pans, rockers, toms, sluices and flumes. Never was such industry, such energy, such ambition to get hold of the object of pursuit and escape from the canon before another winter set up an impassable wall to the civilized world.

Spring came sudden and full-grown from the south. She blew up in a fleet of sultry clouds from the Mexican seas, along the Californian coast, and drew up to us between the rocky, pine-topped walls of the Klamat.

At first she hardly set foot in the canon. The sun came down to us only about noon-tide, and then only tarried long enough to shoot a few bright shafts through the dusk and dense pine-tops at the banks of snow beneath, and spring did not like the