Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/168



it took great caution on the part of the Prince to save his life.

He never talked, never smiled ; a sour, bitter-looking face was his, and he had no friends in the camp out side our own cabin. He stood his club in the corner now, and used the rifle instead. In a few days he had polished the barrel and all the brass ornaments till they shone like silver and gold.

Once a travelling missionary, as he called himself, gave him a tract. He took it to Paquita, who held it up and pretended to him that she could read it all as readily as the white men. This was one of her little deceits. Poor children ! No one had time to teach them to read, or to set them much of an example. How they wondered at the endless toil of the men.

The Doctor in the meantime ranged around the hill sides, wrote some, gathered some plants, and seemed altogether the most listless, wretched, miserable man you could conceive. He made his home in our cabin now, and rarely went to town ; for when he did, so sure one of the hangers-on about the saloons was sure to insult him. Sometimes, however, he would be obliged to go, such as when some accident or severe illness would compel the miners to send for him, and he never refused to attend. On one of these occasions, Spades, half drunk and wholly vicious, caught the Doctor by the throat as he met him in the trail near town, and shook him much as he had been shaken by Sandy some months before.