The Argosy — page 187: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

172 RED RIVER GULLY. _— camp-fire burnt low one clear summer evening; the full moon had risen, and, as she floated through the banks of fleecy clouds, cast her reflection on the lake in a golden path of rays that stretched from shore to shore. ‘Tell you a story? Wall, I guess I kin,” said the old hunter, looking round the circle with alert, bright eyes. ‘‘ You boys always does want amusin’ at this time o’ night. ‘Red River Gully,’ you say. Wall, I ’spose I’d as soon tell you that as anythin’ else.” He cast a keen glance at us, to be sure he should have our atten- tion, and, to humour him, we feigned to move closer, that we might not lose a word. His weather-beaten face relaxed into a smile; he was a born narrator, and loved a sympathetic audience. ‘¢ T warn’t much over twenty, I guess, boys, when I fell in with a crowd as wanted to go out a gold diggin’ to ‘Red River Gully,’ out theer to the Black Hill region. Wall, I hadn’t no objections to makin’ money easy, and we was told as we’d nothin’ to do but pull the nuggets out of the earth as fast as we could dig ’em. So off I goes along with the rest of our boys from old Vermont State. We soon found out as we had to work harder than we’d ever done in our lives before; and though there was some as found considerable of gold along there, I warn’t one of them ; and soI kinder lost heart, and I took up with some fellows as made a better livin’ out of huntin’ than gold diggin’, I had a good enough time after that. “The diggers, as a rule, was a pritty rough set—pritty rough they was, and there was some on ’em a sight wuss than t’others. We called ’em, or, they called themselves, the ‘ Devil’s Own ;’ and they lived together—about a dozen they was—in a shanty a mile from where the rest of us herded together at the mouth of the Cully. Dick Kent, he was the leader of the gang; folks said as how he’d come of a proud Boston family, and had been a Harvard graduate ; and they suspected he’d changed his name. Wall, he was a wild one, was Dick; a big fellow, with fierce, black eyes, and a long beard, and a power over t’others as made you almost think folks was right when they said the Devil himself had got into Dick Kent. That, sirs, was Dick as I first knowed him in ‘Red River Gully.’ “One day, as I was out huntin’, I come on a log cabin, pritty near hidden by the trees as growed on the cliffs, about three miles from the mouth of the Gully. I was so curious to know who could be living there, that I went up to the door to beg a drink of water. ‘There was no one there, boys, but a little gal of about seven years of age, and very small for that ; a purty little gal she was, with hair curlin’ all over her head in golden rings. I was used to my Prayer Gomicbooks.co