Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/176

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she, waving one pretty hand as she held to the woman's robe with the other. I stopped and raised my hat, and called a kind farewell, and undertook to say some pretty things, but just that moment my mule, as mules always will, opened his mouth and brayed and brayed as if he would die. I jerked and kicked him into silence, and then began again ; and again the mule began, this time joined by Limber Jim's. Limber Jim swore in wretched English, but it was no use — the scarlet banner from the wall was to them the signal of war, and they refused to be silenced until we mounted and descended to the glorious pines, where I had rode and roved the sweetest years of my life. Yet still the two hands were iifted from the wall, and the red scarf waved till the tops of the pines came down, and we could see no more. Then I lifted my hat and said, "Adieu! I reckon I shall never see you any more. Never, unless it may come to pass that the world turns utterly against me. And then, what if I were to return and find not a single living savage?" I think I was as a man whose senses were in another world. Once I stopped, dismounted, leaned on my little mule, look ing earnestly back to the rocky point as if about to return; as if almost determined to return at once and there to remain. There was a battle in my heart. At length awakened, I mounted my mule mechanically and went on. We have a cabin here among the oaks and the pines, on a bench of the mountain, looking down on the Sacramento valley, a day's ride distant... . We? Why, yes! That means little "Calli Shasta," the lit tle shy, brown girl that tried to hide, and refused to see me when I first returned to the mountains. She is with me now, and wears a red sash, and a scarf gracefully folded about her shoulders under her rich flow of hair. I call her Shasta because she was born here, under the shadows of Mount Shasta, many stormy years ago. How she can ride, shoot,