AFTER THE DELUGE--WHAT THEN?
By slow degrees, no one knew just when or how, the boy-poet began to
find his way back after a year or two to the Widow's cabin. The miners
wondered that Sandy did not protest. They saw, with some alarm, that the
Widow was even more kind to him than before. Was it the pale pleading
face of the consumptive boy that moved her?
Years went by, and the chronicler stood again in the Forks. The town was
gone; the miners had uprooted its very foundations. Then came floods and
buried the boulders and the banks of the stream, and widened it out and
made it even as a new-plowed field.
Then a man, the Hon. Mr. Sandy, who had sat down with his family quite
satisfied in the Sierras, extended a fence around the site of the old
city, and planted and sowed and then reaped the richest of harvests. On
the site of the Howling Wilderness the yellow golden grain reached up
till it touched the very beard of the giant. So do perish the mining
towns of the Sierras.
The hills are not so wild now; the woods have been mown away, and up on
the hill-sides the miners have sat down, old and wrinkled and few in
numbers; and around their quiet old cabins have planted fruit trees, and
trees even from the tropics. And these trees flourish here too, for
though the snow falls deep, and the sun has little room between the
walls of the mighty canon, still it seems never now so bleak or cold.
There is one little house on the hill-side, with porches, and Spanish
verandahs, and hammocks swinging there, and all that, nestled down among
the fruit-trees that bend with fruit and blossom. Around this cabin and
back of it, and up the mountains among the firs, you see pretty children
passing in and out, laughing as they run, shouting like little Modocs,
shaking back their hair all full of the gold and glory of the California
sun, and making every one happy who beholds them.
"All in the glorious climate of Californy!" says the little man, as he
comes puffing up the hill to his home, and the children of the First
Families run to meet him.
Can it be possible? Did they all grow young again? Did they go back and
begin life at the beginning? Truly, there is something in the climate,
and the fountain of youth flows certainly somewhere out of the Sierras.
For look! there stands a woman winding herself up to welcome her
husband; she is only a little stouter, and is even beautiful.
As for Limber Tim, being an "idecated man," he started a newspaper in
the nearest town, and after many battles and many defeats, finally
climbed high on the ladder of distinction, and is now "the Hon. Mr.
Tim," with a political influence second in that part of the country to
no man, and to only one woman.
How things are changed, to be sure! The caravans of clouds that little
Billie Piper was wont to look up to and wonder at, still cross the
canon, and march and countermarch and curl about the far snow peaks as
before. But the coyote has ceased to howl from the hill-side.
And what can that be curling like steam up from out the mighty forest
that belts the snow peaks about the heads of the three little streams
that make the Forks?
It looks like a train of clouds driven straight through the tree
tops--it is so high and fairy-like and far away. It is as if it were on
the very summit of the Sierras.
Ah! that is the engine blowing off the clouds of steam as she drops,
shoots, slides, glides from the mountain to the sea. The train is a mile
in length. The dust of three thousand miles is on her skirts. But
before the going down of the sun she will draw rein to rest by the
Golden Gate.