Southwest winds brought the warm odor of the pine sap swelling
in the forest, or the faint, far-off spice of wild mustard springing
in the lower valleys. But, as if by some irony of Nature, this gentle
invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance and
discomfort to the haunts and works of man. The ditches were overflowed,
the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift, and the trails
and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud. The stage-coach
from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the mountain highway, its
wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an unctuous pigment like mud
and blood, passed out of it through the overflowed and dangerous ford,
and emerged in spotless purity, leaving its stains behind with Rough
and Ready. A week of enforced idleness on the river "Bar" had driven
the miners to the more comfortable recreation of the saloon bar, its
mirrors, its florid paintings, its armchairs, and its stove. The steam
of their wet boots and the smoke of their pipes hung over the latter
like the sacrificial incense from an altar.
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