"It is a worthless lode," they said, "but he loved it."
So they took powder and made a blast, and with it a great heap of stones, shutting off the end of the tunnel from the outer air, and so left him with his luck and the Golden Fortune.
The white-barked pine grew on the slope of Kearsarge highest up of all the pines, so high that nothing grew above it but brown tufts of grass and the rosy Sierra primroses that shelter under the edges of broken boulders. The white-barked pines are squat and short, trunks creeping along the rocks, and foliage all matted in a close green thatch by the winter's weight. Snow lies on the slope of Kearsarge eight months in the year, deep and smooth over the pines and the jagged rocks; other months there are great storms of rain, and always a strong wind roaring through the Pass, so that, try as it might, no tree could stand erect on those heights. The white-barked pine stretched its body along the ground, and though it was four hundred years old, it was no thicker than a man's leg, and its young branches of seventy-five or a hundred years were still so supple that one could tie knots in them. It grew near the trail, which here crossed through a gap in the crest of the range and straggled on down the other side of the mountain.
Along this trail went many strange things in their season. Early in the year, before the snow had melted at all on the high places, went a great lumbering bear that had a lair above Big Meadows, going down to the calf-pens and pig-sties of the town at the foot of Kearsarge. He ranged back and forth on these little excursions of fifteen or twenty miles in the hungry season of the year, and sometimes there were hunters on his trail with dogs and guns, but nothing ever came of it. When the trail began to run a rivulet from the drip of melting snow banks, the forest ranger went up the Pass, singing as he went and beating his arms to keep himself warm. Afterwards when the snow water was all drained off, he came back and mended the trail. All through the summer there would be parties of miners and hunters with long strings of pack mules, going over Kearsarge to camp in Big Meadows or on the fork of King's River. Sometimes there were parties of Indians with women and children, making very merry with berries, fish, and deer meat. Nearly always, whatever went over the mountain came back again, and the white pine noticed that the same people came again another season. In four hundred years one has space for observation and reflection. Gradually the pine tree grew into the conviction that the other side of the mountain must be much finer than this.