Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/269

 under the

great trees away from even a hint of the sun ; but they never found so much as a trace of the lost cabin, and at last gave it up as a myth not unlike Gold Lake, Gold Beach, and the Lost Dutchman of the earliest days of the Pacific excitements.

I did not return to the mine because, in the first place, I believed that it was only a treacherous pocket that had nothing more to give but promises. But beyond all that, I was trying to rise to the dignity of some little virtue, after the Prince had shown so much, and these Indians had set such good examples. What should I do with the gold, even if I found a mountain of it? My wants were few and simple. Except to make journeys, I did not need a dollar. I had all that I could use; what use, then, had I for more?

I could only point it out to my countrymen, and that meant toil and strife, privation and endurance for them; for the Indians it meant annihilation. With the constant sense before me that it was and is exhausted, I have been enabled to let the leaves fall there, and the moss to grow in the mine for many, many years. Sometimes we have almost to lie to ourselves to get strength to do a simple act of justice; nay, to even not do a deliberate wrong.

What, after all, if my grand, old, noble pyramid of the north, white as faith, sphinx-like looking out over the desert plains of the east, the seas of the west, the sable woods that environ it, should be built on a solid base of gold !