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.