We followed. Nobody was to be seen. In the gathering darkness all that
we could distinguish was that we were in a garden--from the rosebushes
that scattered over us a minute spray from their dripping leaves--and
before a long, rambling wooden building.

"Do you know this Miggles?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.

"No, nor, don't want to," said Bill, shortly, who felt the Pioneer Stage
Company insulted in his person by the contumacious Miggles.

"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge as he thought of the barred
gate.

"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "hadn't you better go
back and sit in the coach till yer introduced? I'm going in," and he
pushed open the door of the building.

A long room lighted only by the embers of a fire that was dying on the
large hearth at its farther extremity; the walls curiously papered, and
the flickering firelight bringing out its grotesque pattern; somebody
sitting in a large armchair by the fireplace. All this we saw as we
crowded together into the room, after the driver and expressman.

"Hello, be you Miggles?" said Yuba Bill to the solitary occupant.

The figure neither spoke nor stirred. Yuba Bill walked wrathfully toward
it, and turned the eye of his coach lantern upon its face. It was a
man's face, prematurely old and wrinkled, with very large eyes, in which
there was that expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity which I had
sometimes seen in an owl's. The large eyes wandered from Bill's face