CHAPTER V.


While this simple pastoral life was centred around the school-house in
the clearing, broken only by an occasional warning pistol-shot in the
direction of the Harrison-McKinstry boundaries, the more business part
of Indian Spring was overtaken by one of those spasms of enterprise
peculiar to all Californian mining settlements. The opening of the
Eureka Ditch and the extension of stagecoach communication from Big
Bluff were events of no small importance, and were celebrated on the
same day. The double occasion overtaxing even the fluent rhetoric of
the editor of the "Star" left him struggling in the metaphorical
difficulties of a Pactolian Spring, which he had rashly turned into
the Ditch, and obliged him to transfer the onerous duty of writing the
editorial on the Big Bluff Extension to the hands of the Honorable Abner
Dean, Assemblyman from Angel's. The loss of the Honorable Mr. Dean's
right eye in an early pioneer fracas did not prevent him from looking
into the dim vista of the future and discovering with that single
unaided optic enough to fill three columns of the "Star." "It is not too
extravagant to say," he remarked with charming deprecation, "that
Indian Spring, through its own perfectly organized system of inland
transportation, the confluence of its North Fork with the Sacramento
River, and their combined effluence into the illimitable Pacific, is
thus put not only into direct communication with far Cathay but even
remoter Antipodean markets. The citizen of Indian Spring taking the 9 A.
M. Pioneer Coach and arriving at Big Bluff at 2.40 is enabled to connect
with the through express to Sacramento the same evening, reaching San
Francisco per the Steam Navigation Company's palatial steamers in time
to take the Pacific Mail Steamer to Yokohama on the following day at
8.30 P. M." Although no citizen of Indian Spring appeared to avail