"Well, not so sudden--not so sudden, considerin' this--this--this glorious climate of Californy." After awhile, when the monte game had asserted itself again, and things were going on in the saloon just about as they were before the Judge made this announcement, a tall and inquisitive man with a hatchet face and a hump in his shoulder, and a twist in his neck, which made him look like an interrogation point, rose up, and reaching his neck out toward the bar, said in a sharp whisper: "I'll bet a forty dollar hoss she's the real Nancy Williams." The red-headed bar-keeper bristled up like a porcupine, and then put out his broad hand as if it was an extinguisher. CHAPTER XIV. A WEDDING IN THE SIERRAS. The wedding-day came. The camp had been invited to a man. There was but one place in the camp that could hold a tithe of its people, and that was the Howling Wilderness. The plan had been to have the wedding under the pines on the hill; but the wind came pitching down the mountain, with frost and snow in his beard, that morning, and drove them to the shelter. What a place was that Howling Wilderness! It was battle-field, prize-ring, dead-house, gambling-hell, court-house, chapel, every thing by turns. There they stood, side by side and hand in hand, before the crackling fire, before the little Judge. The house was hot. It was crowded thick as the men could stand. Tighter than sardines in a tin box, the men stood there bare-headed with hardly room to breathe. The fat little magistrate was terribly embarrassed. He had sent all the way across the mountains by the last pack-train, by the last express, by the last man who had dared the snows, but no pack-train, no express, nothing had returned with the coveted, the so-much-needed marriage ceremony and service, which he had resolved to read to the people, interspersed with such remarks and moral observations as the case might require. Alas! the form of the ceremony had not arrived. He had nothing of the kind to guide him. He had never officiated in this way before. He had never studied up in this branch. Why should he have studied up in this line, when there was but one woman in all his little world? As the form had not arrived, he had nothing in the world but his moral observations to use on this imposing occasion, and he was embarrassed as a man had never been embarrassed before. He stood there trying hard to begin. He could hear the men breathe. The pretty little woman was troubled too. Her face was all the time held down, her eyes drooped, and she did not look up--did not look right or left or anywhere, but seemed to surrender herself to fate, to give herself away. Her soul seemed elsewhere, as if she sat on a high bank above all this, and was not of it or in it at all. "Do you solemnly swear?"