DEVIL'S FORD

by Bret Harte




DEVIL'S FORD




CHAPTER I


It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil's Ford. The half a
dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some
overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of
fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together
on the narrow gorge of Devil's Spur, or cast up on its steep sides. So
sudden and violent had been the change of fortune, that the dwellers
in the older cabins had not had time to change with it, but still kept
their old habits, customs, and even their old clothes. The flour pan in
which their daily bread was mixed stood on the rude table side by side
with the "prospecting pans," half full of gold washed up from their
morning's work; the front windows of the newer tenements looked upon
the one single thoroughfare, but the back door opened upon the uncleared
wilderness, still haunted by the misshapen bulk of bear or the nightly
gliding of catamount.