At this the ladies appeared really so terrified that I asked what “chickers” were, and discovered them to be a kind of insect. “I’ve got my pennyr’yle,” said Mrs. Judge Pennoyer, who was a woman of resource. What a drive it was! We lost our way; and the girls sang. Tim swore, Mrs. Judge Pennoyer laughed, and May and Jeanie sang all the sweeter. Tim Healy thought he saw twenty moonshiners and emptied his revolver at one of them; a charred stump it proved to be. We passed one hut in a clearing, and were refreshed by veritable whiskey; _i.e._, “pine-top” whiskey, milky-white in color, and said to be made out of the cones of pines. We found the trail once more and the stars came out, and the nightingales sang, and May Bruce and young Raoul became more silent. At last we saw, upon a hillside in the forest, the burning pitch-pine torches of the great construction “camp.” Hundreds of black forms surrounded these ruddy fires; from some of the groups came sounds of banjos and negroes singing; and I looked suddenly up and saw the starlight reflected in Miss Jeanie’s eyes. There was only one tent in the camp with “sides” to it--_i.e._, perpendicular flaps making walls below the roof, and that, of course, was sacred to the ladies. We lay beneath a mere =V=-shaped canvas roof, which was stretched downward so as to end some three feet from the ground, our heads in a heap of pillows, and our legs all radiating outward, like a starfish, to terminate in thirty booted feet. Under the canvas back I could see the starlight, and there I lay awake some time regarding it, which now seemed to bear some reflection of Miss Jeanie’s eyes. Next thing came the sun and opened mine by shining into them; then closed them up again, and I rolled into the canvas-shade, and up, and out of doors, and followed Coe and Healy to the “branch” below. Big Bear Creek it was, of a rich red-chocolate color, fit, perhaps, to wash a Chinaman who could not see. Yet Coe took a plunge, and looked up, white enough. “Come in,” he shouted to us, who were hesitating, “it doesn’t come off.” The negroes had been sleeping all over the place, tentless; and now they were pulling themselves together, in groups, and starting for the railroad, or rather where the railroad was to be. On the way they stopped at the commissaries’ to get their breakfast, standing in long rows before the counter, waiting their turn. The commissaries’ stores were the only wooden buildings in camp; well walled and bolted, too, as they had to be, said Tim Healy, to withstand the attacks of a riotous Saturday night. Four men, he said, were always in them armed; and on Saturday nights, pay-night, they would often empty a revolver or two into the crowd and perhaps “drop” a nigger, before it ceased to besiege their doors for fruit or whiskey.