Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 3, 1895 - Travels and Excursions, Volume II

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
A little before stage-time that castle of indolence
awoke. The ostler threw his straw away and set
to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes ;
happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been
waiting for all day about to happen at last ! The
boarders gathered in the verandah, silently giving
ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes.
And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a
sound, not a tremor of the mountain road. The
birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this pre-
monitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped
upon the Toll House with a roar and in a cloud of
dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns
they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their
shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in veils, the long
whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged
upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a
dust-storm, the dead place blossomed into life and
talk and clatter. This the Toll House? — with its
city throng, its jostling shoidders, its infinity of
instant business in the bar ? The mind would not
receive it ! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is
hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of
letters from the post-bag, the childish hope and
interest with which one gazed in all these strangers'
eyes. They paused there but to pass : the blue-clad
China boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery
in the dust-coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the
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