When it was time to turn in, I was shown a space on the gravelly floor of the tent, about six feet by one and a half, where I might stretch out and dream that I dwelt in marble halls. About a dozen men slept in the tent, the others lying outside on the rocks. My intention was from this camp to go on to Downieville, about forty miles up the river; but I had first to return to Foster’s Bar for some drawing-paper which I had ordered from Sacramento. On my way I passed a most romantic little bridge, formed by two pine trees, which had been felled so as to span a deep and thickly wooded ravine. I sat down among the bushes a short distance off the trail, and was making a sketch of the place, when presently a man came along riding on a mule. I was quite aware that I should have a very suspicious appearance to a passer-by, and I was in hopes he might not observe me. I had no object in speaking to him, especially as, had I hailed him from my ambuscade, he might have been apt to reply with his revolver. Just as he was passing, however, and when all I could see of him was his head and shoulders, his eyes wandered over the bank at the side of the trail, and he caught sight of my head looking down on him over the tops of the bushes. He gave a start, as I expected he would, and addressed me with “Good morning, Colonel.” My promotion to the rank of colonel I most probably owed to the fact that he thought it advisable, under the circumstances, to be as conciliatory as possible until he knew my intentions. I saw a good deal of the same man afterwards, but he never again raised me above the rank of captain. I replied to his salutation, and he then asked the very natural question, “What are ye a-doin’ of over there?” I gave an account of myself, which he did not seem to think altogether satisfactory, but, after making some remark on the weather, he passed on. About an hour later, when I arrived at Foster’s Bar, I found him sitting in a store with some half-dozen miners, to whom he had been recounting how he had seen a man concealed in the bushes off the trail. He expressed himself as having been “awful skeered,” and said that he had his pistol out, and was thinking of shooting all the time he was speaking to me. I told him I had mine lying by my side, and would have returned the compliment, when, by way of showing me what sort of a chance I should have stood, he stuck up a card on a tree at about twenty paces, and put six balls into it one after another out of his heavy navy revolver. I confessed I could not beat such shooting as that, and was very well pleased that he had not taken it into his head to make a target of me. It seemed that he was an express carrier, and as his partner had been robbed but a few days before, very near the place of our meeting, his suspicions of me were not at all unreasonable.