University of Virginia Library

16. CHAPTER XVI.
HOME.

A PECULIARLY nervous man suffers from
a mental ailment as distinctly as from a
wound. He grows weak under the sense
of mental distress the same as an ordinary man does
from the loss of blood. Remove the cause of apprehension,
and he recovers the same as the wounded
man recovers. Free the mind, and you stop the flow
of blood. He grows strong again.

We moved on a little way that day, slowly, to be
sure, but fast enough and far enough to be able to
pitch our camp in a place of our own choosing, with
wood, water, and grass, the indispensable requisites
of a mountain camp, all close at hand.

To the astonishment of all, the Doctor unsaddled
his mule, gathered up wood, and was a full half-hand
at supper. At night he spread his own blankets,
looked to his pistols like an old mountaineer, and
seemed to be at last getting in earnest with life.
The next day, as we rode through the trees, he

whistled at the partridges as they ran in strings
across the trails, and chirped at the squirrels overhead.

How delightful it was to ride through the grass
and trees, hear the partridges whistle, pack and
unpack the horses, pitch the tent by the water, and
make a military camp, and talk of war; imagine
battles, shoot from behind the pines, and always, of
course, making yourself a hero. Splendid! I was
busy as a bee. I cooked, packed, stood guard, killed
game, did everything. And so we journeyed on
through the splendid forests, under the face of Shasta,
and over peaceful little streams that wound silently
through the grass, as if afraid, till we came to the
head-waters of the Sacramento.

Sometimes we saw other camps. White tents
pitched down by the shining river, among the scattered
pines; brown mules and spotted ponies feeding,
and half buried in the long grass; and the sound of
the picks in the bar below us all made a picture in
my life to love.

Once we fell in with an Indian party; pretty girls
and lively unsuspicious boys along with their parents,
fishing for salmon, and not altogether at war with
the whites. They treated us with great kindness.

At last we branched off entirely to ourselves, cutting
deep into the mountain as the winter approached,
looking for a home. The weak condition of the

Doctor made it necessary that we brought our
journey to a close. We had taken a different route
from others, for good and sufficient reasons. The
trails and tracks of the hundreds of gold-hunters, who
had mostly preceded us some months, lay considerably
west of Mount Shasta, striking the head of the Sacramento
river at its very source. They had found only
a few bars with float gold, not in sufficient quantities
to warrant the location of a camp, and pushed
on to the mines farther south. Some, however,
returned.

We sometimes met a party of ten or more, all
well armed and mounted, ready to fight or fly as the
case might require. The usual mountain civilities
would be exchanged, brief and brusque enough, and
each party would pass on its way, with a frequent
glance thrown back suspiciously at our Indian
boy with his rifle, the invalid Doctor leaning on his
catenas, the Indian girl with her splendid hair and
face as bright as the morning, and the majestic figure
of the Prince. An odd-looking party was ours, I
confess.

Paquita knew every dimple, bend or spur in these
mountains now. The Prince entrusted her to select
some suitable place to rest. One evening she drew
rein and reached out her hand. Klamat stood his
rifle against a pine, and began to unpack the tired
little mule, and all dismounted without a word.

It was early sundown. A balm and a calm was
on and in all things. The very atmosphere was still
as a shadow and seemed to say, “Rest, rest!” We
were on the edge of an opening; a little prairie of
a thousand acres, inclining south, with tall, very tall
grass, and a little stream straying from where we
stood to wander through the meadow. A wall of
pines stood thick and strong around our little Eden,
and when we had unsaddled our tired animals and
taken the aparrajo from the little packer, we
turned them loose in the little Paradise, without even
so much as a lariat or hackamoor to restrain them.

The sun had just retired from the body of the
mountain, but it was evident that all day long he
rested here and made glad the earth; for crickets
sang in the grass as they sing under the hearthstones
in the cabins of the west, and little birds started up
from the edge of the valley that were not to be found
in the forest.

An elk came out from the fringe of the wood,
threw his antlers back on his shoulders with his
brown nose lifted, and blew a blast as he turned to
fly that made the horses jerk their heads from the
grass, and start and wheel around with fright. Brown
deer came out, too, as if to take a walk in the meadow
beneath the moon, but snuffed a breath from
the intruders and turned away. Bears came out two
by two in single file, but did not seem to notice us.

Some men say that the bear is deprived of the sense
of smell in the wild state. A mistake. He relies as
much on his nose as the deer; perhaps more, for his
little black eyes are so small that they surely are
not equal to the great liquid eyes of the buck, which
are so set in his head that he may see far and wide
at once. But the bear carries his nose close to the
ground, while that of the deer is lifted, and of course
can hardly smell an intruder in his dominions until
he comes upon his track. Then it is curious to observe
him. He throws himself on his hind legs,
stands up tall as a man, thrusts out his nose, lifts it,
snuffs the air, turns all around in his tracks, and
looks and smells in every direction for his enemy.
If he is a cub, however, or even a cowardly grown
bear, he wheels about the moment he comes upon
the track, will not cross it under any circumstances,
and plunges again into the thicket.

We had a blazing fire soon, and at last, when
we had sat down to the mountain meal, spread on
a canvas mantaro on the ground, each man on his
saddle or a roll of blankets, with his knife in hand,
Klamat looked at our limited supply of provisions,
and then pointed to the game in the meadow.

He pictured sun-rise, the hunt, the deer, the
crack of his rifle, and how he would come into camp
laden with supplies. All this, he gave us to understand,
would take place to-morrow, as he placed a

sandwich between his teeth, and threw his eyes
across his shoulder at the dark figures stealing
through the grass across the other side of our little
Eden.

The morning witnessed the fulfilment. Paquita
was more than busy all day in dressing venison, and
drying the meat for winter. The place was as full
of game as a park. No lonelier or more isolated place
than this on earth. We walked about and viewed
our new estates. The mules and ponies rolled in
the rich grass, or rested in the sun with drooping
heads and half-closed eyes.

Even the invalid Doctor seemed to revive in a
most sudden and marvellous way. He saw that no
white man's foot had ever trod the grasses of this
valley; that there we might rest and rest and never
rise up from fear. He could trust the wall of pine
that environed us. It was impassable. He stood
before an alder-tree that leaned across the babbling,
crooked little stream, and with his sheath-knife cut
this one word:—Home.

A little way from here Paquita showed us another
opening in the forest. This was a wider valley,
with warm sulphur and soda springs in a great
crescent all around the upper rim. Here the elk
would come to winter, she said; and hence we could
never want for meat. The earth and atmosphere
were kept warm here from the eternal springs; and

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE LOST CABIN.

[Description: 645EAF. Illustration page. A man with a stick is standing next to a tree with his right hand resting on the tree. In the background there is a cabin with some long rods leaning up against it and more piled in front of the cabin. The cabin and man are in the woods and there is a creek next to the man.]

grass, she said, was fresh and grew the winter
through.

This is the true source of the stream which the
white men call Soda; the proper Indian name of
which is Numken; and here we built our cabin,
reared a fortress against the approaching winter
without delay, for every night his sentries were
coming down bolder and bolder about the camp.

This was the famous “Lost Cabin.” It stood on
a hillside, a little above the prairie, facing the sun,
close to the warm springs, and on the very head of
the Numken, and was not unlike an ordinary miner's
cabin, except that the fireplace was in the centre
of the room instead of being awkwardly placed at
one end, where but few can get the benefit of the
fire. This departure was not without reason.

In the first place, the two Indians, constituting
nearly half of the voting population of our little colony,
insisted on it with a zeal that was certainly commendable;
and as they insisted on nothing else, it
was only justice to listen to them in this.

“By-and-by my people will come,” said Paquita,
“and then you will want an Indian fire, a fire that
they can sit down by and around without sending
somebody back in the cold.”

Again, you cannot build a cabin so strong with
one end devoted to a chimney, as if it is one solid
square body of logs. Then, it is no small task to

build a chimney out of stone with only your hands
for a trowel and black mud for mortar.

All these things considered, we placed the fire in
the centre of the cabin on the earth-floor, and let
the smoke curl up and out through an opening in
the roof, as it always does and always will, in a
graceful sort of way, if you build a fire as an Indian
builds it.

The Doctor was getting strong again. As this
man grew strong in a measure, it is a little remarkable
that my sympathies were withdrawn proportionably.

I state this as a very remarkable fact. As the
pitiful condition of the Doctor daily grew less, his
crimes began to loom up and grow larger. They had
sunk down almost out of sight; but now as this man
began to lift up his hands to take part in the life
around him, I shrank back and said to myself, There
is blood on them—human blood.

No Indian had as yet, so far as we knew, discovered
us. Paquita had from the first, around
the fire, told her plans; how that as soon as she
should be well rested from the journey, and a house
was built and meat secured for the winter, she would
take her pony, strike a trail that lay still deeper in
the woods, and follow it up till she came to her
father's winter lodges.

How enthusiastically she pictured the reception.

How clearly she pourtrayed it all. She would ride
into the village at sun-down, alone; the dogs would
bark a great deal at her red dress and her nice new
apparel. Then she would dismount and go straight
up to her father's lodge and sit down by the door.
The Indians would pass by and pretend not to see
her, but all the time be looking slily sideways, half-dead
to know who she was. Then, after a while,
some one of the women would come out and bring
her some water. Maybe that would be her sister.
If it was her sister, she would lift up her left arm
and show her the three little marks on the wrist,
and then they would know her and lead her into the
lodge in delight.

One fine morning she set forth on her contemplated
journey. I did not now like the place so
well. For the first time, I found fault with the
things around me. The forest was black, gloomy,
ghostly—a thing to be dreaded. Before, it was
dreamy, deep—a marvel, a something to love and
delight in. The cabin, that had been a very palace,
was now so small and narrow, it seemed I would
suffocate in the smoke. The fires did not burn so
well as they did before. Nobody could build a fire
like Paquita.

Back from our cabin a little way were some grand
old bluffs, topped with pine and cedar, from which
the view of valley, forest, and mountain, was all that

could be desired. A little way down the Numken,
from the warm springs, the waters of the valley came
together and went plunging all afoam down the
canon, almost impassable even for footmen. Here
we found fine veins of quartz, and first-rate indications
of gold both in the rock and in the placer.
The Prince and the Doctor revived their theories on
the origin of gold, and had many plans for putting
their speculations to the test.

Klamat was never idle, yet he was never social.
There was a bitterness, a sort of savage deviltry, in
all he did. A fierce positive nature was his, and
hardly bridled at that.

Whether that disposition dated further back than
a certain winter, when the dead were heaped up and
the wigwams burned on the banks of the Klamat, or
whether it was born there of the blood and bodies in
the snow, and came to life only when a little, naked,
skeleton savage sprung up in the midst of men with
a club, I do not pretend to say, but I should guess
the latter. I can picture him a little boy with bow
and arrows, not over gentle it is true, but still a
patient little savage, like the rest, talking and taking
part in the sports, like those around him. Now he
was prematurely old. He never laughed; never so
much as smiled; took no delight in anything and
yet refused to complain. He took hold of things,
did his part, but kept his secrets and his sorrows to
himself, whatever they may have been.

Klamat never alluded to the massacre in any way
whatever. Once, when it was mentioned, he turned
his head and pretended not to hear. Yet, somehow
it seemed to me that that scene was before him every
moment. He saw it in the fire at night, in the forest
by day. There are natures that cannot forget if they
would. A scene like that settles down in the mind;
it takes up its abode there and refuses to go away.
His was such a nature.

In fact, Indians in the aggregate forget less than
any other people. They remember the least kindness
perfectly well all through life, and a deep wrong is
as difficult to forget. The reason is, I should say,
because the Indian does not meet with a great deal
of kindness as he goes through life. His mind and
memory are hardly overtaxed, I think, in remembering
good deeds from the white man.

Besides, their lives are very monotonous. But
few events occur of importance outside their wars.
They have no commercial speculations to call off the
mind in that direction; no books to forget themselves
in, and cannot go beyond the sea, and hide in old
cities, to escape any great sorrow that pursues them.
So they have learned to remember the good and the
bad better than do their enemies.

This cabin of ours in the trees on the rim of the
clearing grew soon to be a sacred place to all. Here
was rest absolute, unqualified repose. Eight-hour

laws, late or early rising, in order to conform to the
fashion of the country, did not concern us here.
There were no days in which we were required to
remain in to receive company, no days in which we
were expected to make calls. We named the cabin
the “Castle,” and the Doctor cut out wooden cannon,
mounted them on pine stumps before the door as on
little towers, and turned them on the world below.