We visit the Franklin House just opposite. The political candidate’s money must not all be spent in one house. This is one of the fundamental principles in electioneering. Every saloon controls a few votes, or rather a few whiskey-sodden organizations, who are voted like machines. The solemn ordeal of an American treat is again witnessed. Jim Brown becomes affectionately and patriotically drunk, and as we ride away loudly proclaims himself a “white man and in favor of a white man’s government.” We feel that Spring Gulch is secure. We carry it in our pocket. We ride a couple of miles over the ridge to Six-Bit Gulch. Red crags tower upward for hundreds of feet; a rivulet flows along, and on a little flat under a spreading live-oak is an old log cabin. In front is a bit of vegetable garden inclosed by old sluice lumber. High up in the branches overhead a gauze-covered meat-safe; on the trunk is nailed a coffee-mill; under it hangs a frying-pan; close by the washtub and wash-board a few fowl peck about; the quail in a clump of chaparral near by are querously twittering, scolding and fluttering, and making the preliminary arrangements for their night’s rest. Sam Lugar, gray and worn, resident in this gulch for the last sixteen years, sits outside the door smoking his evening pipe. A hundred yards above is the residence of the “Judge,” another hard-working, whiskey-drinking hermit. A glance within shows the Judge eating his evening meal. A child is playing about on the mud floor, whose creamy complexion and bright bead-like eyes indicate its Indian origin. Hanging above the fire-place are a gun, an Indian bow, a quiver full of glass-tipped arrows; on the shelf bits of gold-studded quartz, a bunch of crystals, petrifactions, and curiously-shaped stones found by the “Judge” from time to time in his diggings. There are boxes full of old magazines and newspapers; on the rude window-sill a coverless, well-worn copy of Shakespeare. The Judge is tall, straight, and sallow in complexion. He has lived on this spot since 1849. Six-Bit Gulch was very rich. He has torn up virgin gold in the grass roots. He lives now on recollections of the flush times. Present failures and long past successes form the staple of his conversation. His mining is merely secondary to another occupation, the great aspiration of his life--to beat a poker game over in Spring Gulch. He has been unsuccessfully trying this for the last seven years. A bundle of aboriginal duskiness enveloped in a bright calico gown, hanging about her adipose proportions, stirs as we enter. That is the Judge’s wife--a squaw. Her family down to the third generation, are camped in the brush hard by. They visit the Judge at stated intervals, and at such times the family expenses are trebled. The gray shirt and duck pants tied at the waist with a string constitute the Judge’s only dress-suit. On the floor near him is a shapeless, wet mass of India rubber boots, shirt and pants,