Description

A Waif of the Mountains

169 pages 

IT had been snowing hard for twenty-four hours at Dead Man’s Gulch. Beginning with a few
feathery particles, they had steadily increased in number until the biting air was filled with
billions of snowflakes, which whirled and eddied in the gale that howled through the
gorges and cañons of the Sierras. It was still snowing with no sign of cessation, and the
blizzard blanketed the earth to the depth of several feet, filling up the treacherous hollows,
caverns and abysses and making travel almost impossible for man or animal.
The shanties of the miners in Dead Man’s Gulch were just eleven in number. They were
strung along the eastern side of the gorge and at an altitude of two or three hundred feet
from the bed of the pass or cañon. The site protruded in the form of a table-land, offering a
secure foundation for the structures, which were thus elevated sufficiently to be beyond
reach of the terrific torrents that sometimes rushed through the ravine during 2 the melting
of the snow in the spring, or after one of those fierce cloud-bursts that give scarcely a
minute’s warning of their coming.