Then the man with the rent, the lord of the log cabin--a cross between a Shylock-Jew and a flint-faced Yankee--took her rings and jewels, one by one. The baker grew exacting, and finally the butcher refused to bring her meat. And that was all there was of it. That was the end. That butcher never succeeded there after that. Some one wrote "Small Pox" over his shop every night for a month, and it was shunned like a pest-house. But all that did not bring poor Dolores back to life. The ring was an antique gold, with a costly stone, and a Spanish name, which showed her to have been of good family. A wedding ring. But this woman, however, was an exception, and at best, when in health, save her generous and sympathetic nature, was probably no angel. One of these meddlesome men, a hungry, lean, unsatisfied fellow; a man with a nose sharp and inquisitive enough to open a cast-iron cannon ball, said one night to a knot of men at the Howling Wilderness saloon: "Why widder? why call her the widder? who knows that she was ever married at all?" A man silently and slowly arose at this, and firmly doubled up his fist. He stood there towering above that fellow, and looking down upon that sharp inquisitive nose as if he wanted to drive it back into the middle of his head. "But maybe she's a maid," answered the terrified nose in haste and fear. The other sat down, slowly and silently, as he had risen, and perfectly satisfied that no insult had been intended. This was Sandy. The Judge was there, and as the conversation had fallen through by this man's remark, he felt called upon to resume it in a friendly sort of a way, and said: "No, no, she's not a maid, I reckon, not an old maid." He scratched his bald head above his ear and went on, for the big man at his side began to double up his knuckles. "I should say she's a widder. You see, the maids never gits this far. They seem to spile first." The Judge spoke as if talking of a sort of pickled oyster or smoked ham. CHAPTER IV. SUNDAY IN THE SIERRAS. Never did the press feed on a political war, or a calumniated poet, as these men of the Howling Wilderness fed on this one woman of the Forks. Yet let it be remembered they always, and to a man, with scarce an exception, spoke of her with the profoundest respect. Few of them had had the pleasure of seeing her, fewer still of speaking to her, yet she was the ever-present topic. Even the weather in a London Winter is hardly more popular a theme, than was the Widow when they met in knots in the little town after the day's work was over.