The Border Legion

Joan calculated she must have seen a thousand miners in less than

two miles of the gulch, and then she could not see up the draws and

washes that intersected the slope, and she could not see beyond the

camp.

But it was not a camp which she was entering; it was a tent-walled

town, a city of squat log cabins, a long, motley, checkered jumble

of structures thrown up and together in mad haste. The wide road

split it in the middle and seemed a stream of color and life. Joan

rode between two lines of horses, burros, oxen, mules, packs and

loads and canvas-domed wagons and gaudy vehicles resembling gipsy

caravans. The street was as busy as a beehive and as noisy as a

bedlam. The sidewalks were rough-hewn planks and they rattled under

the tread of booted men. There were tents on the ground and tents on

floors and tents on log walls. And farther on began the lines of

cabins-stores and shops and saloons--and then a great, square, flat

structure with a flaring sign in crude gold letters, "Last Nugget,"

from which came the creak of iddles and scrape of boots, and hoarse

mirth. Joan saw strange, wild-looking creatures--women that made her

shrink; and several others of her sex, hurrying along, carrying

sacks or buckets, worn and bewildered-looking women, the sight of

whom gave her a pang. She saw lounging Indians and groups of lazy,

bearded men, just like Kells's band, and gamblers in long, black

coats, and frontiersmen in fringed buckskin, and Mexicans with

swarthy faces under wide, peaked sombreros; and then in great

majority, dominating that stream of life, the lean and stalwart

miners, of all ages, in their check shirts and high boots, all

packing guns, jostling along, dark-browed, somber, and intent. These

last were the workers of this vast beehive; the others were the

drones, the parasites.

Kell's party rode on through the town, and Smith halted them beyond

the outskirts, near a grove of spruce-trees, where camp was to be

made.

Joan pondered over her impression of Alder Creek. It was confused;

she had seen too much. But out of what she had seen and heard loomed

two contrasting features: a throng of toiling miners, slaves to

their lust for gold and actuated by ambitions, hopes, and aims,

honest, rugged, tireless workers, but frenzied in that strange

pursuit; and a lesser crowd, like leeches, living for and off the

gold they did not dig with blood of hand and sweat of brow.

Manifestly Jesse Smith had selected the spot for Kells's permanent

location at Alder Creek with an eye for the bandit's peculiar needs.

It was out of sight of town, yet within a hundred rods of the

nearest huts, and closer than that to a sawmill. It could be

approached by a shallow ravine that wound away toward the creek. It

was backed up against a rugged bluff in which there was a narrow

gorge, choked with pieces of weathered cliff; and no doubt the

bandits could go and come in that direction. There was a spring near

at hand and a grove of spruce-trees. The ground was rocky, and

apparently unfit for the digging of gold.