So he sets out on his lonely walk. Of how much has he thought while plodding over it. Here the same big buckeye brushes against his face as it did in the “spring of ’50,” when he was twenty years younger and had a sweetheart in the “States,” whose memory was fresh and warm. It has all died out since. The letters became less and less, the years more and more, and then all came to a dead standstill and he received the village paper, and there, appropriately below the column of deaths, he read of her marriage, whereat he went to camp and plunged wildly into all the concert saloon could give and made things howl and boldly challenged the chronic poker game and won. The trail turns suddenly. It has run over the rocks by the river, its trail at times for many feet almost illegible, a vague smoothly-worn streak over ledge and loose boulders, polished and strewn with new white sand and pebbles by some unusually high freshet. But here the shelving bank suddenly ceases. It becomes a precipice. Up the hard-worn path in the red earth he climbs forty, fifty, sixty feet. It is closely hedged with chemisal. Now he emerges near the brow of the high rocky bluff. In all its moonlit glory surges, bubbles, and roars the river below. Its yellow muddiness of the day is now changed to a dark shade of brown, with tremulous silver bars. Night and the moon are the artists. CHAPTER XVI. THE COW FEVER. About this time (1861) a cow fever began to rage throughout the State. It got hold of people, and impressed them with a burning idea that the road to fortune was a cow path, and that fortunes lay in keeping cattle. The cow fever reached the seclusion of Swett’s Bar. We invested all our spare cash in cows and waited for results. Cattle were spoken of as a sure card for fortune. Keep cattle. Buy improved breeds. Raise them. “Cross” them. Feed them for nothing on the native grass. Buy cows. Cows give milk. People can live on milk. Milk then to us was a luxury. It paid no milkman to travel up and down the rough and rocky ledges of the Tuolumne ringing his bell at miners’ cabins half a mile apart. Indeed he could not so travel without carrying his milk _à la_ panier on a donkey’s back, and by the time it had reached its place of destination it would have been agitated to butter. So all of us miners went in for cows. Improved cows. We bought each an improved cow. We hauled this cow by ropes across the raging, eddying, furious river to our side. Frequently she arrived more dead than alive. Then came a season of hope and expectation as to fortunes through cows. We arose at five in the morning, built the fire for breakfast, went out and sought our cows, generally feeding or reposing a mile or more from our cabins, caught these cows, milked them, returned to the cabin, finished the cooking of either a burned or cold breakfast, went forth and labored in the claim till noon, came home, cooked dinner, went forth again, at 1 <small>P.M.</small>,