THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP


There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight,
for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire
settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but "Tuttle's
grocery" had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered,
calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot
each other to death over the bar in the front room. The whole camp
was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing.
Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman
was frequently repeated. It was a name familiar enough in the
camp,--"Cherokee Sal."

Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to
be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman
in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she
most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and
irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear
even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her
loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation
which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so
dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin that, at a
moment when she most lacked her sex's intuitive tenderness and care, she
met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates. Yet
a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings. Sandy