No sooner had this radical clean-up of the body politic been consummated than the rains began. That means little to any but a Californian. To him it means everything. We were quite new to the climate and the conditions, so that the whole thing was a great surprise.

For a month past it had been threatening. The clouds gathered and piled and blackened until they seemed fairly on the point of bursting. One would not have given two cents for his chances of a dry skin were he to start on a journey across the street. Yet somehow nothing happened. Late in the afternoon, perhaps, the thunderous portents would thin. The diffused light would become stronger. Far down in the west bars of sunlight would strike. And by evening the stars shone brilliantly from a sky swept clear. After a dozen repetitions of this phenomenon we ceased to pay any attention to it. Somebody named it “high fog,” which did well enough to differentiate it from a genuine rain-bringing cloud. Except for that peculiar gourd that looks exactly like a watermelon, these “high fogs” were the best imitation of a real thing I have ever seen. They came up like rain clouds, they looked precisely like rain clouds, they went through all the performances of rain clouds–except that never, never did they rain!

372But the day of the Vigilante execution the sky little by little turned shimmering gray; so that the sun shining from it looked like silver; and the shadows of objects were diffused and pale. A tepid wind blew gently but steadily from the southeast. No clouds were visible at first; but imperceptibly, around the peaks, filmy veils formed seemingly out of the gray substance of the very sky itself. How these thickened and spread I did not see; but when I came out of the Bella Union, after a long and interesting evening of discussion, I found no stars; and, as I stood looking upward, a large warm drop splashed against my face.

Sometime during the night it began to rain in earnest. We were awakened by its steady drumming on the canvas of our tent.

“My Lord! but she sure is raining!” said Johnny across the roar of sound.

“Don’t tech the canvas!” warned Old. “If you do, she’ll leak like a spout where you teched her!”

“Thank heaven, that high fog scared us into ditching around the tent,” said Cal fervently.

But our satisfaction was short-lived. We had ditched the tent, to be sure, but we had badly underestimated the volume of a California downpour.

Before many minutes had passed Johnny gave a disgusted snort.

“I’m lying in a marsh!” he cried.

He struck a light, and we all saw the water trickling in a dozen little streams beneath the edge of the tent.

373“We’re going to be ruined!” cried Johnny comically.

He arose, and in doing so brushed his head violently against the slanting canvas roof. Almost immediately thereafter the rays of the lantern were reflected from tiny beads of water, like a sweat, appearing as though by magic at that spot. They swelled, gathered, hesitated, then began to feel their way slowly down the dry canvas. The trickle became a stream. A large drop fell straight down. Another followed.

“Anybody need a drink?” inquired Cal.

“I’m sorry!” said Johnny contritely.

“You needn’t be,” I consoled him. “The whole thing is going to leak, if this keeps up.”

“What’s the matter with going over to the MoreÑa cabin?” queried Yank.

We hesitated a little. The events of the day had affected us all more deeply than we liked to acknowledge; and nobody but Yank much liked the idea of again entering that blood-stained abode.

“We’d drown getting there,” said Cal at last. “I move some of you fellows with two good arms rustle out and fix that ditch.” He laughed. “Nothing like having a hole in you to get out of work.”

We took his advice, and managed to turn the flood, though we got very wet in the process.

Then we returned to the tent, changed our clothes, crept into our blankets, and wrapped ourselves close. The spot brushed by Johnny’s head dripped steadily. Otherwise our roof shed well. The rain roared straight down with steady, deadly persistency.

374“She can’t keep this up long, anyway; that’s a comfort,” muttered Johnny sleepily.

Couldn’t she? All next morning that flood came down without the let-up of even a single moment. It had all the volume and violence of a black thunderstorm at its height; only the worst of the thunderstorm lasts but a few moments, while this showed no signs of ever intending to end. Our stout canvas continued to turn the worst of it, but a fine spray was driven through, to our great discomfort. We did not even attempt to build a fire, but sat around wrapped in our damp blankets.

Until about two of the afternoon the deluge continued. Our unique topic of conversation was the marvel of how it could keep it up! We could not imagine more water falling were every stream and lake in the mountains to be lifted to the heavens and poured down again.

“Where the devil does it all come from?” marvelled Old, again and again. “Don’t seem like no resevoy, let alone clouds, could hold so much!”

“And where does it go to?” I supplemented.

“I reckon some of those plains people could tell you,” surmised Yank shrewdly.

At two o’clock the downpour ceased as abruptly as though it had been turned off at a spigot. Inside of twenty minutes the clouds had broken, to show beyond them a dazzling blue sky. Intermittent flashes and bands of sunlight glittered on the wet trees and bushes or threw into relief the black bands of storm clouds near the horizon.

Immensely cheered, we threw aside our soggy blankets and sallied forth.

375“Great Christmas!” cried Johnny, who was in the advance. “Talk about your mud!”

We did talk about it. It was the deepest, most tenacious, slipperiest, most adhesive mud any fiend ever imagined. We slid and floundered as though we had on skates; we accumulated balls of it underfoot; and we sank disconcertingly half-leg deep at every third step. Our first intention had been to go up to town; but we soon revised that, and went down to the MoreÑa cabin instead, with the idea of looking after the two horses. The beasts, very shaggy underneath and plastered above, stood humped up nose to tail. We looked into the cabin. The roof had leaked like a sieve; and the interior was dripping in a thousand places.

“Reckon even the tent was better after all,” acknowledged Yank, looking with disfavour on the muddy floor.

We returned to the tent and made shift to get a fire going. After cooking some hot food, we felt better, and set about drying our blankets. In the caÑon we could hear the river roaring away hollowly.

“I’ll bet she’s on the rampage!” said Old.

“I’ll bet she’s got my cradle and all of my tools!” I cried, struck with a sudden thought.

And then, about as we commenced to feel cheerful and contented again, the scattered black clouds began to close ranks. One by one the patches of blue sky narrowed and disappeared.

“Why!” cried Cal in astonishment, “I believe it’s getting ready to rain again!”

376“Shucks!” replied Old, “It can’t. There ain’t no more rain.”

Nevertheless there was, and plenty of it. We spent that second night shifting as little as possible so as not to touch a new cold place in our sodden blankets, while the waters roared down in almost a solid sheet.

This lasted the incredible period of four days! Nobody then knew anything about measuring rainfall; but, judging by later experience, I should say we must have had close to seven inches. There was not much we could do, except to get wetter and wetter, although we made shift to double up at night, and to use the extra blankets thus released to make a sort of double roof. This helped some.

The morning of the fifth day broke dazzlingly clear. The sky looked burnished as a blue jewel; the sunlight glittered like shimmering metal; distant objects stood out plain-cut, without atmosphere. For the first time we felt encouraged to dare that awful mud, and so slopped over to town.

We found the place fairly drowned out. No one, in his first year, thought of building for the weather. Barnes’s hotel, the Empire and the Bella Union had come through without shipping a drop, for they had been erected by men with experience in the California climate; but almost everybody else had been leaked upon a-plenty. And the deep dust of the travel-worn overland road had turned into a morass beyond belief or description.

Our first intimation of a definite seasonal change came from our old friend Danny Randall, who hailed us at once when he saw us picking our way gingerly along the edge 377 of the street. In answer to his summons we entered the Bella Union.

“I hope you boys weren’t quite drowned out,” he greeted us. “You don’t look particularly careworn.”

We exchanged the appropriate comments; then Danny came at once to business.

“Now I’m going to pay off you three boys,” he told the express messengers, “and I want to know what you want. I can give you the dust, or I can give you an order on a San Francisco firm, just as you choose.”

“Express business busted?” asked Johnny.

“It’s quit for the season,” Danny Randall told him, “like everything else. In two weeks at most there won’t be a score of men left in Italian Bar.” He observed our astonished incredulity, smiled, and continued: “You boys came from the East, where it rains and gets over it. But out here it doesn’t get over it. Have you been down to look at the river? No? Well, you’d better take a look. There’ll be no more bar mining done there for a while. And what’s a mining camp without mining? Go talk to the men of ’48. They’ll tell you. The season is over, boys, until next spring; and you may just as well make up your minds to hike out now as later. What are you laughing at?” he asked Johnny.

“I was just thinking of our big Vigilante organization,” he chuckled.

“I suppose it’s true that mighty few of the same lot will ever get back to Italian Bar,” agreed Danny, “but it’s a good thing for whatever community they may hit next year.”

378Johnny and Old elected to take their wages in dust; Cal decided on the order against the San Francisco firm. Then we wandered down to where we could overlook the bar itself.

The entire bed of the river was filled from rim to rim with a rolling brown flood. The bars, sand-spits, gravel-banks had all disappeared. Whole trees bobbed and sank and raised skeleton arms or tangled roots as they were swept along by the current or caught back by the eddies; and underneath the roar of the waters we heard the dull rumbling and crunching of boulders rolled beneath the flood. A crowd of men was watching in idle curiosity. We learned that all the cradles and most of the tools had been lost; and heard rumours of cabins or camps located too low having been swept away.

That evening we held a very serious discussion of our prospects and plans. Yank announced himself as fit to travel, and ready to do so, provided he could have a horse; the express messengers were out of a job; I had lost all my tools, and was heartily tired of gold washing, even had conditions permitted me to continue. Beside which, we were all feeling quite rich and prosperous. We had not made enormous fortunes as we had confidently anticipated when we left New York, but we were all possessed of good sums of money. Yank had the least, owing to the fact that he had been robbed of his Porcupine River product, and had been compelled for nearly three months to lie idle; but even he could count on a thousand dollars or so sent out from Hangman’s Gulch. I had the most, for my digging had paid me better than had Johnny’s 379 express riding. But much of my share belonged of right to Talbot Ward.

Having once made up our minds to leave, we could not go too soon. A revulsion seized us. In two days the high winds that immediately sprang up from the west had dried the surface moisture. We said good-bye to all our friends–Danny Randall, Dr. Rankin, Barnes, and the few miners with whom we had become intimate. Danny was even then himself preparing to return to Sonoma as soon as the road should be open to wagons. Dr. Rankin intended to accompany him, ostensibly because he saw a fine professional opening at Sonoma, in reality because in his shy, hidden fashion he loved Danny.

Nobody objecting, we commandeered the two horses that had belonged to the MoreÑas. One of them we packed with our few effects, and turned the other over to Yank. Thus, trudging afoot, Johnny and I saw our last of Italian Bar. Thirty years later I rode up there out of sheer curiosity. Most of the old cabins had fallen in. The Bella Union was a drear and draughty wreck. The Empire was used as a stable. Barnes’s place and Morton’s next door had burned down. Only three of the many houses were inhabited. In two of them dwelt old men, tending small gardens and orchards. I do not doubt they too were Forty-niners; but I did not stop. The place was full of too many ghosts.