The Cars Drew Up In A Street - If Street
That Could Be Called Which Was Only A Wide, Cleared Space,
Intersected by rails, with here and there a stump, and great
piles of sawn logs bulking big in the moonlight,
And a number of
irregular clap-board, steep-roofed houses, many of them with
open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. We had
pulled up at the door of a rough Western hotel, with a partially
open front, being a bar-room crowded with men drinking and
smoking, and the space between it and the cars was a moving mass
of loafers and passengers. On the tracks, engines, tolling heavy
bells, were mightily moving, the glare from their cyclopean eyes
dulling the light of a forest which was burning fitfully on a
mountain side; and on open spaces great fires of pine logs were
burning cheerily, with groups of men round them. A band was
playing noisily, and the unholy sound of tom-toms was not far
off. Mountains - the Sierras of many a fireside dream - seemed to
wall in the town, and great pines stood out, sharp and clear cut,
against a sky in which a moon and stars were shining frostily.
It was a sharp frost at that great height, and when an
"irrepressible rigger," who seemed to represent the hotel
establishment, deposited me and my carpetbag in a room which
answered for "the parlor," I was glad to find some remains of
pine knots still alight in the stove.
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