Free The Girl of the Golden West by Giacomo Puccini, David Belasco

brilliant scarlet. For a moment, also,
the purple hills became wonderful piles of dull gold and copper; a
moment more and the magic hand of the King of Day was
withdrawn.
    In front of them now, dark, gloomy and threatening rose Cloudy
Mountain, from which the Mining Camp took its name; and on a
plateau near its base the camp itself could plainly be seen. It
consisted of a group of miners' cabins set among pines, firs and
manzaneta bushes with two larger pine-slab buildings, and scattered
around in various places were shafts, whose crude timber-hoists
appeared merely as vague outlines in the fast-fading light. The
distance to the camp from where they stood was not over three miles
as the crow flies, but it appeared much less in the rarefied
atmosphere.
    As the two bandits stood on the edge of the precipice looking
across and beyond the intervening gulch or ravine, here and there a
light twinkled out from the cabins and, presently, a much stronger
illumination shot forth from one of the larger and more pretentious
buildings. Castro was quick to call his master's attention to
it.
    "There—that place with the light is The Palmetto Hotel!" he
exclaimed. "And over there—the one with the larger light is The
Polka Saloon!" For even as he spoke the powerful kerosene lamp of
The Polka Saloon, flanked by a composition metal reflector, flashed
out its light into the gloom enveloping the desolate,
ominous-looking mountains.
    Johnson regarded this building long and thoughtfully. Then his
eyes made out a steep trail which zigzagged from The Polka Saloon
up the barren slopes of the mountain until it reached a cabin
perched on the very top, the steps and porch of which were held up
by poles made of trees. There, also, a light could be seen, but
dimly. It was a strange place for anyone to erect a dwelling-place,
and he found himself wondering what manner of person dwelt there.
Of one thing he was certain: whoever it was the mountains were
loved for themselves, for no mere digger of gold would think of
erecting a habitation in view of those strange, vast, and silent
heights!
    And as he meditated thus, he perceived that the far off Sierras
were forming a background for a sinuous coil of smoke from the
cabin. For some time he watched it curling up into the great arch
of sky. It was as if he were hypnotised by it and, in a vague,
shadowy way, he had a sense of being connected, somehow, with the
little cabin and its recluse. Was this feeling that he had a
premonition of danger? Was this a moment of foreboding and distrust
of the situation yet to be revealed? For like most venturesome men
he always had a moment before every one of his undertakings in
which his instinct either urged him forward or held him back.
    Suddenly he became conscious that his eyes no longer saw the
smoke. He stared hard to glimpse it, but it was gone. And with a
supreme effort he wrenched himself free from a sort of paralysis
which was stealing away his senses.
    Now the light in the cabin disappeared, and since the shades of
night, for which he had been waiting, had fallen, he called to the
impatient and wondering Castro, and together they went back to the
trail.
    But even as they crossed the gulch and reached the outskirts of
the camp a great white moon rose from behind the Sierras. To
Castro, hidden now in the pines, it meant nothing so long as it did
not interfere with his purpose. As a matter of fact he was already
listening intently to the bursts of song and shouts of revelry that
came every now and then from the nearby saloon. But his master,
unaccountably under the spell of the moon's mystery and romance,
watched it until it shed its silvery and magic light upon the lone
cabin on the top of Cloudy Mountain, which Fate had chosen for the
decisive scene of his dramatic life.

Chapter 5
     
    Inside The Polka, not a bit more, and not a bit less sardonic—it
was this imperturbability which made him so resistless to most
people—than he was prior to the banishment of The