Shadows of Shasta

The old glory of the camp was gone, and only a few battered and crippled men were left. It was as if there had been a great battle of the giants, and the victorious and successful had gone away with all the fruits of victory, and left the wounded, the helpless, the half-hearted behind. The mining camp at the mouth of the great canyon had been worked out, so far as the placer mines went, and these few broken men who remained, as a rule, were turning their attention to other things. Here one had planted a little garden on the hillside, on a spot that had once been a graveyard. There, an old lawyer had grown grape-vines all over and about the door and chimney of his cabin, till men said it looked like a spider-web.