THE
Overland Monthly.
DEVOTED TO
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY.
Vol. VII. (Second Series.)—JANUARY, 1886.—No. 37.
GOLDEN GRAVES.
You have often asked me to tell you about my Christmas in the mines. I fear that in looking forward to my story you are anticipating something very different from its reality. Christmas has always been so pleasantly associated with mirth and revelry, with dancing and feasting, with the interchange of gifts and the formation of friendships, with the burial of deeply-cherished animosities, and the return of long-lost loved ones, that it becomes hard to believe there can be any corner of the world in which the day brings only trial and suffering. Even in the mines of California it would seem as though there must be festive gatherings in the place of labor, and an interchange of stories about the dear ones at home, and much jovial drinking of their heaths; and that, for the day at least, all sickness, and weariness, and poverty, and hardship must either be absent, or, through some heroic exercise of the will, be disregarded. But that was not in my experience at the Lowber Bar.
The story properly begins in the early part of the preceding fall, and with the trial of Mark Sintley, the gambler. He had appeared at Lowber Bar about a month before, and from the first had been considered by most of the miners a very undesirable acquisition. The disturbances into which his professional vocation threw us were many; and when at last, his resort to the pistol, in a quarrel over the faro-board, put him into the power of the law, the deed was accepted almost with acclamation, as furnishing a welcome opportunity to rid ourselves of an unpleasing element. I think that scarcely an hour had elapsed before Mark Sintley was in custody, a judge elected, and a jury formed; for legal proceedings, when necessary, seldom suffered much delay in those stirring times of 1849.
As I gazed at the prisoner, sitting upon a camp-stool in front of the jury, I could not resist a sentiment of regret as for a choice piece of nature unappropriately assigned.
He was such a handsome fellow—not much over thirty-five years of age, tall and shapely, with dark, curling hair, bright eyes, and something in his expression that indicated a faculty of unusual fascination whenever he was disposed to exert it; having withal a not unpleasing dare-devil look, which now had full delineation as he sat smoking his cigar, with his head thrown back in a not altogether unsuccessful affectation of unconcern, though from the very first he must have known full well that his case was hopeless. But I felt regretfully how gallantly,
Vol. VII.—1.(Copyright, 1886, by Overlord Monthly Co. All Rights Reserved.)
