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Mrs. Skagg's Husbands, and Other Sketches
Mrs Skagg's Husbands and Other Sketches Author:Bret Harte Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HOW SANTA GLAUS CAME TO SIMP SON'S BAR. IT had been raining in the valley of the Sacramento. The North Fork had overflowed its banks and Rattlesnake Creek was... more » impassable. The few boulders that had marked the summer ford at Simpson's Crossing were obliterated by a vast sheet of water stretching to the foothills. The up stage was stopped at Grangers; the last mail had been abandoned in the tules, the rider swimming for his life. " An area," remarked the " Sierra Avalanche," with pensive local pride, " as large as the State of Massachusetts is now under water." Nor was the weather any better in the foothills. The mud lay deep on the mountain road ; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson's Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson's Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow's nest to the rockyentablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook in the blast. As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds. Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson's store, clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation unnecessary. Indeed, most methods of diversion had long since been exhausted on Simpson's Bar; high water had suspended the regular occupations on gulch and on river, and a consequent lack of money and whiskey had taken the z...« less