The startled passenger beside him on the box followed the direction of his eyes.  Through an opening in the wayside pines he could see, a few hundred yards away, a cuplike hollow in the hillside of the vividest green.  In the centre a young girl of fifteen or sixteen was dancing and keeping step to the castanet “click” of a pair of “bones,” such as negro minstrels use, held in her hands above her head.  But, more singular still, a few paces before her a large goat, with its neck roughly wreathed with flowers and vines, was taking ungainly bounds and leaps in imitation of its companion.  The wild background of the Sierras, the pastoral hollow, the incongruousness of the figures, and the vivid color of the girl’s red flannel petticoat showing beneath her calico skirt, that had been pinned around her waist, made a striking picture, which by this time had attracted all eyes.  Perhaps the dancing of the girl suggested a negro “break-down” rather than any known sylvan measure; but all this, and even the clatter of the bones, was made gracious by the distance.

“Esmeralda! by the living Harry!” shouted the excited passenger on the box.

Yuba Bill took his feet off the brake, and turned a look of deep scorn upon his companion as he gathered the reins again.

“It’s that blanked goat, outer Rocky Canyon beyond, and Polly Harkness!  How did she ever come to take up with him?”

Nevertheless, as soon as the coach reached Rocky Canyon, the story was quickly told by the passengers, corroborated by Yuba Bill, and highly colored by the observer on the box-seat.  Harkness was known to be a new-comer who lived with his wife and only daughter on the other side of Skinners Pass.  He was a “logger” and charcoal-burner, who had eaten his way into the serried ranks of pines below the pass, and established in these efforts an almost insurmountable cordon of fallen trees, stripped bark, and charcoal pits around the clearing where his rude log hut stood,—­which kept his seclusion unbroken.  He was said to be a half-savage mountaineer from Georgia, in whose rude fastnesses he had distilled unlawful whiskey, and that his tastes and habits unfitted him for civilization.  His wife chewed and smoked; he was believed to make a fiery brew of his own from acorns and pine nuts; he seldom came to Rocky Canyon except for provisions; his logs were slipped down a “shoot” or slide to the river, where they voyaged once a month to a distant mill, but he did not accompany them.  The daughter, seldom seen at Rocky Canyon, was a half-grown girl, brown as autumn fern, wild-eyed, disheveled, in a homespun skirt, sunbonnet, and boy’s brogans.  Such were the plain facts which skeptical Rocky Canyon opposed to the passengers’ legends.  Nevertheless, some of the younger miners found it not out of their way to go over Skinners Pass on the journey to the river, but with what success was not told.  It was said, however, that a celebrated New York artist,