At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly
Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed
geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
hotel to lead them here and there about the woods. For three
people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so
venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and
almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit. They were only going to
stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles
of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner? Not they!
Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the verandah by a
wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry,
they proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd
old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a
bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to
that boy. Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter
a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He
was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him
to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was
"a hole there in the hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more
nor less--Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards
to look complacently down that hole. For two hours we looked for
houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five
they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.

However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit