hould
be opened in the spring. This they now had, and at once took advantage of the opportunity.
In these days no man thought of refusing credit. A man who had said " No credit ! " would have had " no business " in the mines. Any merchant, saloon keeper, or butcher, who had had the littleness and audacity to have put up the sign u No tick," now so frequent in mining camps and border towns, at that time would have stood a first-rate chance of having his house pulled down about his ears. These men had a strangely just way of doing things in the early days. They did not ask for credit often, but when they did they wanted it, needed it, and woe then to the man who refused. Every man in the camp was told of it, in no modified form, you may be sure ; and that shop and that man were, at the least, shunned thereafter, as if one had been a pest-house and the other the keeper of it.
We could mine no more, could pick-and-shovel no more, with frosty fingers, in the frozen ground, by the pine-log fire, down by the complaining, troubled little stream. The mine was buried with the brook.
I used to think some strange and sympathetic things of this stream, even in our hardest battles for a respectable existence on its banks, that gloomy, weary winter. That stream was never satisfied. It ran, and foamed, and fretted, hurried and hid under the boughs and bushes, held on to the roots and grasses, and lifted little white hands as it ran to ward the Klamat, a stronger and braver brother, as
