after his habit, would trust to the inspiration of the moment. At the
worst he could resign a situation that now appeared to require more
tact and delicacy than seemed consistent with his position, and he was
obliged to confess to himself that he had lately suspected that his
present occupation--the temporary expedient of a poor but clever young
man of twenty--was scarcely bringing him nearer a realization of his
daily dreams. For Mr. Jack Ford was a youthful pilgrim who had sought
his fortune in California so lightly equipped that even in the matter of
kin and advisers he was deficient. That prospective fortune had already
eluded him in San Francisco, had apparently not waited for him in
Sacramento, and now seemed never to have been at Indian Spring.
Nevertheless, when he was once out of sight of the school-house he lit a
cigar, put his hands in his pockets, and strode on with the cheerfulness
of that youth to which all things are possible.

The children had already dispersed as mysteriously and completely as
they had arrived. Between him and the straggling hamlet of Indian Spring
the landscape seemed to be without sound or motion. The wooded upland or
ridge on which the schoolhouse stood, half a mile further on, began
to slope gradually towards the river, on whose banks, seen from that
distance, the town appeared to have been scattered irregularly or thrown
together hastily, as if cast ashore by some overflow--the Cosmopolitan
Hotel drifting into the Baptist church, and dragging in its tail
of wreckage two saloons and a blacksmith's shop; while the County
Court-house was stranded in solitary grandeur in a waste of gravel half
a mile away. The intervening flat was still gashed and furrowed by the
remorseless engines of earlier gold-seekers.

Mr. Ford was in little sympathy with this unsuccessful record of
frontier endeavor--the fortune HE had sought did not seem to lie in that