Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1917-08-02

and Borriest sne runs out TO CeiaAes
Bald~in's place on Little creek, I'm
thinking. The Richlander business
was only an incident. Stanton told
me that much"
As the event proved, the seller Of
ranch lands would have lost his bet on
the funeral attendance. For some IN
known reason the notice OF Smiths
death did not appear in the afternoon
papers, and only few people went out
in autos to see the coffin lowered by
Williams workmen into grave on
the mesa behind the construction
camp; grave among others where
the victims of an early industrial &C
scident at the dam had been buried.
Those who went out from town came
back rather scandalized. There had
been a most hard-hearted lack of the
common formalities, they said; a
cheap coffin, no minister, no mOurners,
not even the poor fellows business
associates in the company he had
fought so hard to save from defeat and
extinction. It was a shame!
With this report passing from lip to
lip in Brewster, another bit of gossip
to the effect that Starbuck and Still
ings had gone East with the disap-
pointed sheriff ito clear Smiths mem
ory," as the street-talk had it, called
forth no little comment. In the HOphra
House cafe on the evening Of the
funeral day Stryker, the mining spec
ulator, was loud in his criticisms of
the High Line people.
"Yes!" he rallied; "a couple of 'em
will go on a junketing trip East to
'clear his memory after they've let
their 'wOps' at the dam bury him like
yellow dog And this Richlander
woman; they say she'd known him
ever since he and she were school
kids together; she went down and
took the train with her father just
about the time they were planting the
poor devil
Three weeks of the matchless Au-
gust weather had slipped by without
incident other than the indictment by
the grand jury of Crawford Stanton
Barney MGraw, and a number of 9th
ers on q charge of conspiracy; and
Williams, unmOleSted since the night
of the grand battle in which Sheriff
Harding had figured as the master of
the hunt, had completed the great
ditch system and was installing the
machinery in the lately finished power
| house.
Over the hills from the northern
mountain boundary Of the Timanyoni
| a wandering prOspectOr had come with
| a vague tale of a new strike in Sunrise
Gulch, a placer district worked out
and abandoned twenty years earlier in
the height of the Red Butte excite
ment. Questioned closely, the tale
bringer confessed that he had no proof
positive Of the strike; but in the hills
| he had found q Well-WOrn trail, lately
used, leading to the old camp, and
| from one Of the deserted cabins in
| the gulch he had seen smoke arising.
AS to the fact OF the trail the wan
uSTlnS Idl6-DedTGF WAS not DIT lduIL.
On the most perfect of the late-in-
August mornings young woman, clad
in serviceable khaki, and keeping her
cowboy headgear and buff top-boots in
good countenance by riding astride in
a mans saddle, was pushing her mount
up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch.
From the top of a little rise the aban-
dOned camp came into view, its heaps
| of worked-over gravel sprouting thick
| ly with the wild growth of twenty
years, and it's crumbling shacks, only
one of which seemed to have survived
in habitable entirety, scattered among
| the frs of the gulch.
At the top of the rise the horsewom-
an drew rein and shaded her eyes
with q gantleted hand. On a bench
| beside the door on the single tenanted
cabin a man was sitting, and she saw
| him stand to answer her hand-wave.
| 4 few minutes later the man, a gaunt