It was two days before Christmas.  There was nothing in the air, sky, or landscape of that Sierran slope to suggest the season to the Eastern stranger.  A soft rain had been dropping for a week on laurel, pine, and buckeye, and the blades of springing grasses and shyly opening flowers.  Sedate and silent hillsides that had grown dumb and parched towards the end of the dry season became gently articulate again; there were murmurs in hushed and forgotten canyons, the leap and laugh of water among the dry bones of dusty creeks, and the full song of the larger forks and rivers.  Southwest winds brought the warm odor of the pine sap swelling in the forest, or the faint, far-off spice of wild mustard springing in the lower valleys.  But, as if by some irony of Nature, this gentle invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance and discomfort to the haunts and works of man.  The ditches were overflowed, the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift, and the trails and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud.  The stage-coach from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the mountain highway, its wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an unctuous pigment like mud and blood, passed out of it through the overflowed and dangerous ford, and emerged in spotless purity, leaving its stains behind with Rough and Ready.  A week of enforced idleness on the river “Bar” had driven the miners to the more comfortable recreation of the saloon bar, its mirrors, its florid paintings, its armchairs, and its stove.  The steam of their wet boots and the smoke of their pipes hung over the latter like the sacrificial incense from an altar.  But the attitude of the men was more critical and censorious than contented, and showed little of the gentleness of the weather or season.

“Did you hear if the stage brought down any more relations of Spindler’s?”

The barkeeper, to whom this question was addressed, shifted his lounging position against the bar and said, “I reckon not, ez far ez I know.”

“And that old bloat of a second cousin—­that crimson beak—­what kem down yesterday,—­he ain’t bin hangin’ round here today for his reg’lar pizon?”

“No,” said the barkeeper thoughtfully, “I reckon Spindler’s got him locked up, and is settin’ on him to keep him sober till after Christmas, and prevent you boys gettin’ at him.”

“He’ll have the jimjams before that,” returned the first speaker; “and how about that dead beat of a half-nephew who borrowed twenty dollars of Yuba Bill on the way down, and then wanted to get off at Shootersvilie, but Bill wouldn’t let him, and scooted him down to Spindler’s and collected the money from Spindler himself afore he’d give him up?”

“He’s up thar with the rest of the menagerie,” said the barkeeper, “but I reckon that Mrs. Price hez bin feedin’ him up.  And ye know the old woman—­that fifty-fifth cousin by marriage—­whom Joe Chandler swears he remembers ez an old cook for a Chinese restaurant in Stockton,—­darn my skin ef that Mrs. Price hasn’t rigged her out in some fancy duds of her own, and made her look quite decent.”