Page:Life Among the Piutes.djvu/67

 wife of the young man threw herself down on his dead body. Such weeping was enough to make the very mountains weep to see them. They would take the dead bodies in their arms, and they were all bloody themselves. I ran to Mrs. Ormsbey crying. I thought my poor heart would break. I said to her, “I believe those Washoe women. They say their men are all innocent. They say they were not away from their camp for a long time, and how could they have been the men that killed the white men?” I told her all I had heard the women say, and I said I believed them. Mrs. Ormsbey said,—

“How came the Washoe arrows there? and the chief himself has brought them to us, and my husband knows what he is doing.”

I ran back to see what they were going to do with the dead bodies, as I had heard my people say that the Washoes were like the Digger Indians, who burn their dead. When I got there the Washoe chief was talking to my brother. I did not know what he said before I came, but I know from what I heard that he had been making confession. He said, pointing down to the men that were innocently killed,—

“It is true what the women say,—it is I who have killed them. Their blood is on my hands. I know their spirits will haunt me, and give me bad luck while I live.”

This was what the Washoe chief said to my brother. The one that was wounded also died, and the sister and the mother it was dreadful to see. The mother cried out,—

“Oh, may the Good Spirit send the same curse upon you! You may all live to see the day when you will suffer at the hands of your white brothers, as you call them.” She said to her girl,—

“My child, you have no brother now,—no one to love