Now, Bill Cosgrieve was known as "The King of Cameron Creek," and Cameron Creek enjoyed an unsavoury reputation among the law-abiding—and, the more unsavoury became its reputation, the more Cameron Creek enjoyed it.
In the days of the great gold rush, the camp of Two Prong flourished on the site of old Jimmie Ferguson's rich placer strike. But the sand was only shallow drift, the placers ran out, and, as a disgruntled miner told it: "Two Prong jes' na'ch'ly flourished itself plumb down to bed rock, an' blow'd up." One by one, the cabins were deserted as their owners sought other fields, or followed fresh stampedes. Freight-loaded poling-boats, and light bark canoes no longer ascended the creek, and in the winter, snow lay deep over its valley. But Cameron Creek was not entirely deserted. Two or three of the rotting cabins of Two Prong were still tenanted, and in the long, log room that had once been the N. C. Company's store, old Jap Kinkade kept a few shelves of canned goods, and a dejected assortment of mittens, tobacco, and clothing. And, above Two Prong, strung along the whole length of its hundred miles of mountain windings, were the isolated
