There were two or three wooden "stores," from
which the windows and doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer
settlement of Wynyard's Gulch. Four or five buildings that still were
inhabited--the blacksmith's shop, the post-office, a pioneer's
cabin, and the old hotel and stage-office--only accented the general
desolation. The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far
beyond the others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with
adobe walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of
half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried pods
in the oven-like heat.
The proprietor of this building, Colonel Swinger, had been looked
upon by the community as a person quite as remote, old-fashioned, and
inconsistent with present progress as the house itself. He was an old
Virginian, who had emigrated from his decaying plantation on the James
River only to find the slaves, which he had brought with him, freed men
when they touched Californian soil; to be driven by Northern progress
and "smartness" out of the larger cities into the mountains, to fix
himself at last, with the hopeless fatuity of his race, upon an already
impoverished settlement; to sink his scant capital in hopeless shafts
and ledges, and finally to take over the decaying hostelry of Buena
Vista, with its desultory custom and few, lingering, impecunious guests.
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