Last Night, However, I Took It Out,
Cleaned And Oiled It, And Laid It Under My Pillow, Resolving To
Keep Awake All Night.
I slept as soon as I lay down, and never
woke till the bright morning sun shone through the roof, making
me ridicule my own fears and abjure pistols for ever.
I. L. B.
Letter XII
Deer Valley - Lynch law - Vigilance committees - The silver
spruce - Taste and abstinence - The whisky fiend - Smartness -
Turkey creek Canyon - The Indian problem - Public
rascality - Friendly meetings - The way to the Golden City - A
rising settlement - Clear Creek Canyon - Staging - Swearing - A
mountain town.
DEER VALLEY, November.
To-night I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farm - large,
warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean,
cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for
two free-tongued, noisy Irish women, who keep a miners'
boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in
a freight wagon, are telling the most fearful stories of
violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and "stringing," that
I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to think that where
I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago men were
being shot like skunks. At the mining towns up above this nobody
is thought anything of who has not killed a man - i.e. in a
certain set. These women had a boarder, only fifteen, who
thought he could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and
they gave an absurd account of the lad dodging about with a
revolver, and not getting up courage enough to insult any one,
till at last he hid himself in the stable and shot the first
Chinaman who entered.
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