Iowa Hill, the nearest post-office, was a
good eight miles distant, by trail, across the Indian River. It was
sixteen miles by stage from Iowa Hill to Colfax, on the line of the
Overland Railroad, and all of a hundred miles from Colfax to San
Francisco.
To Lockwood's mind this isolation was in itself an attraction. Tucked
away in this fold of the Sierras, forgotten, remote, the little
community of a hundred souls that comprised the _personnel_ of the
Hand-over-fist lived out its life with the completeness of an
independent State, having its own government, its own institutions and
customs. Besides all this, it had its own dramas as well--little
complications that developed with the swiftness of whirlpools, and that
trended toward culmination with true Western directness. Lockwood,
college-bred--he was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines--found
the life interesting.
On this particular evening he sat over his pipe rather longer than
usual, seduced by the beauty of the scene and the moment. It was very
quiet. The prolonged rumble of the mine's stamp-mill came to his ears in
a ceaseless diapason, but the sound was so much a matter of course that
Lockwood no longer heard it. The millions of pines and redwoods that
covered the flanks of the mountains were absolutely still. No wind was
stirring in their needles. But the chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato,
was as incessant as the pounding of the mill.
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