THE RESPECTABLE PILE AND AN IDLE WINTER--ONLY ONE STREET--GAMBLING AND DRINKING--A WESTERN COMMUNIST--"KEERDS"--A STICKY WRIST--EIGHT HUNDRED PER CENT--NORTH OR SOUTH--A BLOW FOR THE OLD FLAG--NECK OR NOTHING--A COMPULSORY COLD BATH--NOT VERY MUCH DAMAGED--UNABLE TO GET COMPENSATION. After a somewhat brief rest, Harry Arnold, with Bill and myself, determined upon returning to Honey Lake Valley. Nothing worthy of notice occurred until we reached Susanville, except that we travelled by night, and lay in camp during the day, to avoid the chance of discovery by any scouting party of Indians. It was now late in the year, and as, after hearing the danger I had run, my wife was unwilling that I should so soon leave her again, we determined, with the balance of the Rangers whom we had left on the Humboldt, to pass this winter in comparative rest. That is to say, we would hunt deer for the market in Virginia City, and set a few traps. The probability is that we arrived at this conclusion, from the fact that we had all of us more or less made money during the past year. Those of us who had been mining nearer home had done sufficiently well; while, in addition to what the three of us had been paid as guides by Colonel Connor, we had gathered a very reasonable pile of gold-dust while in the neighborhood of Idaho. Consequently, we were all of us disposed to enjoy the proceeds of our toil, and do as little hard work as possible. My first business was, of course, to see to the comfort of the little woman whom I had been again absent from, for so many months. Indeed, there was some surprise on the part of my friends to find me now and then declining, not only to join their hunting expeditions, but in addition sometimes refusing to form one in their raids upon the Faro and Monte banks which were run in various saloons, one of the most notorious being that in Burkett's Saloon, kept going by Heap and Hale, the John Chamberlains of Susanville. It will, probably, not astonish my readers to hear that these raids were by no means altogether flattering in their results to the skill and good fortune of the Rangers. There is one anecdote which will not prove unamusing. It is, indeed, so characteristic of the inner life of the place, as well as of the general inner life of the mining districts, that I cannot refrain from recounting it. Up to the present time, I have neglected to describe Susanville. It was by no means a large city, according to the Eastern notion of what a city should be. Nor, possibly, did it enjoy an over and above large share of civilized respectability.