The miners built themselves cabins in which to live, and so there came into being a town. It was a dusty, new little town; but venerable in its age--old air from the first. The cabins themselves were low and dark, flanking the street closely, a sort of monotone of brown, by which the stable, the saloon, and the hotel were thrown into stronger relief; the one by virtue of its wide-open door, the other two because of their porch and painted front respectively. These structures held the eye. One noticed the cane chairs on the stoop; the bench outside the saloon; the dumped down saddles, the hay dust, the lazy loafers about the stable. And always one drew aside instinctively to the edge of the broad, white, dusty street, as if to let pass a horse race, or a train of cars, or something equally swift and irresistible. The camp lived on each side of that river of blinding white; never in it. Later, perhaps, when Copper Creek reached the industrial or producing stage, and became domestic, it would be a Rubicon over which contending armies of small boys would dispute the supremacy of the north and south side of the town. Now it wore a constant air of being quite empty. Perhaps nothing was more characteristic, struck the eye more forcibly, lingered longer in the memory as the dominant note in the impressionistic picture of the place, than this single silent road; not even the sombre cabins, or the great pine-clad hills, or the clear mountain air imparting a quality of its own to the very appearance of things, or the little singing brook that ran behind one row of cabins and the stable, or the eagles wheeling and screaming so far up in the blue Western sky. The town seemed to draw back on either side of the road to avoid spoiling its effect, over-awed by it, humbled by its dignified solemnity. Copper Creek would have been willing to have its history recounted by that road, which was primarily, indeed, the cause of its being. And Bill Martin, in the cane chair of his stoop, the only man capable of recounting that history, owed most of his unique knowledge of events to the ancient thoroughfare. Men came from the lower gulch, abode their brief hour, and disappeared into the thin air of the upper curve. From one wing, across the white stage, out by the other wing, the actors changed; the setting remained always the same.