The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

The man who had now rediscovered Hurdy-Gurdy was evidently not curious as to its archæology.  Nor, as he looked about him upon the dismal evidences of wasted work and broken hopes, their dispiriting significance accentuated by the ironical pomp of a cheap gilding by the rising sun, did he supplement his sigh of weariness by one of sensibility.  He simply removed from the back of his tired burro a miner’s outfit a trifle larger than the animal itself, picketed that creature and selecting a hatchet from his kit moved off at once across the dry bed of Injun Creek to the top of a low, gravelly hill beyond.

Stepping across a prostrate fence of brush and boards he picked up one of the latter, split it into five parts and sharpened them at one end.  He then began a kind of search, occasionally stooping to examine something with close attention.  At last his patient scrutiny appeared to be rewarded with success, for he suddenly erected his figure to its full height, made a gesture of satisfaction, pronounced the word “Scarry” and at once strode away with long, equal steps, which he counted.  Then he stopped and drove one of his stakes into the earth.  He then looked carefully about him, measured off a number of paces over a singularly uneven ground and hammered in another.  Pacing off twice the distance at a right angle to his former course he drove down a third, and repeating the process sank home the fourth, and then a fifth.  This he split at the top and in the cleft inserted an old letter envelope covered with an intricate system of pencil tracks.  In short, he staked off a hill claim in strict accordance with the local mining laws of Hurdy-Gurdy and put up the customary notice.

It is necessary to explain that one of the adjuncts to Hurdy-Gurdy—­one to which that metropolis became afterward itself an adjunct—­was a cemetery.  In the first week of the camp’s existence this had been thoughtfully laid out by a committee of citizens.  The day after had been signalized by a debate between two members of the committee, with reference to a more eligible site, and on the third day the necropolis was inaugurated by a double funeral.  As the camp had waned the cemetery had waxed; and long before the ultimate inhabitant, victorious alike over the insidious malaria and the forthright revolver, had turned the tail of his pack-ass upon Injun Creek the outlying settlement had become a populous if not popular suburb.  And now, when the town was fallen into the sere and yellow leaf of an unlovely senility, the graveyard—­though somewhat marred by time and circumstance, and not altogether exempt from innovations in grammar and experiments in orthography, to say nothing of the devastating coyote—­answered the humble needs of its denizens with reasonable completeness.  It comprised a generous two acres of ground, which with commendable thrift but needless care had been selected for its mineral unworth, contained two or three skeleton trees (one of which had a stout lateral branch from which a weather-wasted rope still significantly dangled), half a hundred gravelly mounds, a score of rude headboards displaying the literary peculiarities above mentioned and a struggling colony of prickly pears.  Altogether, God’s Location, as with characteristic reverence it had been called, could justly boast of an indubitably superior quality of desolation.  It was in the most thickly settled part of this interesting demesne that Mr. Jefferson Doman staked off his claim.  If in the prosecution of his design he should deem it expedient to remove any of the dead they would have the right to be suitably reinterred.