Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/116



But besides that there was a sort of nobility about him; his recklessness, his desire to die, lifting his little arms against an army of strong and reckless men, his proud and defiant courage, that made me feel at once that he was above me, stronger, somehow better, than I. Still, he was a boy and I was a boy the only boys in the camp ; and my heart went out, strong and true, towards him. The work of destruc tion was now too complete. There was not found another living thing nothing but two or three Indians that had been shot and shot, and yet seemed determined never to die, that lay in the bloody snow down towards the rim of the river. Naked nearly, they were, and only skeletons, with the longest and blackest hair tangled and tossed, and blown in strips and strings, or in clouds out on the white and the blood-red snow, or down their tawny backs, or over their hairy breasts, about their dusky forms, fierce and uiiconquered, with the bloodless lips set close, and blue, and cold, and firm, like steel.

The dead lay around us, piled up in places, limbs twisted with limbs in the wrestle with death; a mother embracing her boy here; an arm thrown around a neck there ; as if these wild people could love as well as die.