OCR Text |
Show 22. Bill had come to California in '^9 and had stayed in the West when most of his friends had given up and gone back home. The young couple the miners xiere burying now had come with t h e i r baby apparently just for the x-iarm months. Bill had become t i r e d of screening in the cold viater, f i r s t in the California gold streams then here in Washoe country, and he xias nox? glad to cook for the miners in his shack he'd gradually nailed together. He had built i t out of logs he'd cut himself. First as a place to get out of the ftoise and dust in the town; then he'd decided to live out here and had continued working on i t until he thought i t x-ias one of the xvarmest cabins in the area, even when a r e a l l y bad blizzard h i t . Some of the miners felt the same way, and during the months they lived xrith him, and a t e his cooking, they cut him in on the gold they screened. He xrent outside nox-r and stepped off twelve feet from the middle of the window. Then he dug a deep hole. Next he went around in back of the shack where the sun s t i ll t©s full on his small vegetable garden. He dug up the three rows of carrots and separated them into txro p i l e s. The biggest p i l e he buried deep in the hole and covered i t up. r-hen put a few pine branches over i t . These carrots he planned to dig up in the spring. You couldn't buy any fresh vegetables here. Wagon t r a i n s never hauled anyth-ihg fresh pver the long mountain road and by the time easterners came over the desert they had nothing fresh to s e l l. |