Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/31

 e moment

you touched the mountains you seemed to touch a new current of blood.

The old man left his motley army of vaqueros mostly to me, and I was practically captain of the caravan. Not unfrequently, of a morning, we would find ourselves short of a Mexican, who had dis appeared in the night with one of the best horses. Sometimes in the daytime these men would get sulky and cross with the cold and cruel old master, and ride off before his face. These men would have to be replaced by others, picked up here and there, of a still more questionable character.

We reached Northern California after a long and lonely journey, through wild and fertile valleys, with only the smoke of wigwams curling from the fringe of trees that hemmed them in, or from the river bank that cleft the little Edens to disprove the fancy that here might have been the Paradise and here the scene of the expulsion.

We crossed flashing rivers, still white and clear, that since have become turbid yellow pools with barren banks of boulders, shorn of their overhanging foliage, and drained of flood by ditches that the resolute miner has led even around the mountain top.

On entering Pit River Valley we met with thou sands of Indians, gathered there for the purpose of fishing, perhaps, but they kindly assisted us across the two branches of the river, and gave no signs of ill