Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/365

 litude was

now only the more dreadful. My voice came back in strange echoes from the basalt bluffs, and that was all the answer I ever had.

The Indian girl lay dead in my arms. Blood on my hands, blood on my clothes, and blood on the grass and stones.

The lonely July night was soft and sultry. The great white moon rose up and rolled along the heavens, and sifted through the boughs that lifted above and reached from the hanging cliff, and fell in lines and spangles across the face and form of my dead.

Paquita !

Once so alone in the awful presence of death, I became terrified. My heart arid soul were strung to such a tension, it became intolerable. I would have started up and fled. But where could I have fled, even had I had the strength to fly ? I bent my head, and tried to hide my face.

Paquita dead !

Our lives had first run together in currents of blood on the snow, in persecution, ruin, and de struction ; in the shadows and in the desolation of death; and so now they separated for ever.

Paquita dead !

We had starved together ; stood by the sounding cataracts, threaded the forests, roamed by the river- banks together; grown from childhood, as it were, together. But now she had gone away, crossed the dark and mystic river alone, and left