Nor was the weather any better in the foothills. The mud lay deep on the mountain road; waggons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson’s Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut-off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson’s Bar, on the eve of Christmas Day, 1862, clung like a swallow’s nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook in the blast. As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds. Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson’s store, clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation unnecessary. Indeed most methods of diversion had long since been exhausted on Simpson’s Bar; high water had suspended the regular occupations on gulch and on river, and a consequent lack of money and whisky had taken the zest from most illegitimate recreation. Even Mr. Hamlin was fain to leave the Bar with fifty dollars in his pocket—the only amount actually realised of the large sums won by him in the successful exercise of his arduous profession. “Ef I was asked,” he remarked somewhat later—“ef I was asked to pint out a purty little village where a retired sport as didn’t care for money could exercise hisself frequent and lively, I’d say Simpson’s Bar; but for a young man with a large family depending on his exertions, it don’t pay.” As Mr. Hamlin’s family consisted mainly of female adults, this remark is quoted rather to show the breadth of his humour than the exact extent of his responsibilities. Howbeit, the unconscious objects of this satire sat that evening in the listless apathy begotten of idleness and lack of excitement. Even the sudden splashing of hoofs before the door did not arouse them. Dick Bullen alone paused in the act of scraping out his pipe, and lifted his head; but no other one of the group indicated any interest in, or recognition of, the man who entered. It was a figure familiar enough to the company, and known in Simpson’s Bar as “The Old Man.” A man of perhaps fifty years, grizzled and scant of hair, but still fresh and youthful of complexion. A face full of ready, but not very powerful sympathy, with a chameleon-like aptitude for taking on the shade and colour of contiguous moods and feelings. He had evidently just left some hilarious companions, and did not at first notice the gravity of the group, but clapped the shoulder of the nearest man jocularly, and threw himself into a vacant chair.