point where our horses must be recinched, to prevent the saddles slipping over their tails and dumping us over the precipice, as they go up an acclivity steeper and more difficult of ascent than any we have as yet encountered. This matter of cinching a California mustang is no trifling feat for a green hand to essay. The wide band of woven horsehair, known as the cinch, is drawn up by the powerful purchase on the látigo strap until it deeply imbeds itself in the animal's belly, causing him to swell himself up like a toad to resist the pressure, and not unfrequently—especially if he sees that you are a stranger at the business—to commence a rearing, plunging, kicking, and biting performance, involving danger to life and limb.
We soon reached Deer Flat, a little park-like plateau, in a sheltered nook within a mile of the top of the mountain, and stopped for a breathing spell. A few years ago, when all California was wild with excitement and everybody was getting rich—on paper—from wild-cat mining stocks, every hill and mountain around San Francisco was bored, and tunnelled, and drifted in search of gold and silver bearing quartz. Claims were actually staked off in the streets of San Francisco, and companies formed to work them, on the strength of a few wandering bits of metalliferous rock having been picked up here and there. The prospectors pushed their way up here into the rocky defiles of Mount Diablo, and finding traces of gold, silver and copper, organized dozens of companies to work the "leads." For months the deep gorges of the mountain echoed the sound of the sledge, the
