Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/405



of their birth. Yet such is the case here, and all up and down the Sierras. A sort of tacit agreement it seems to have been from the first, that they should not ask of the past, that they began a new life here. The plains and the great seas they had crossed were as gulfs of oblivion. Was it an agreement that we should all begin life even here, and equal? or was it because these men were above any low curiosity, be cause they had something to do beside prying into the past lives of their neighbours ? I should say that this fine peculiarity grew largely out of the latter.

But here it seemed the Prince and I had at last pitched our tent for good, together. I had told him of my ten years battle just past, and he had re counted his. He had crossed and recrossed the Cordilleras and the Andes, sailed up and down the Amazon, fought in Nicaragua, and at last raised an old Spanish galleon from Fonseca filled with doubloons and Mexican dollars that had gone down in the sea half a century before.

But the past! Was he really a Prince, and if he was really a Prince why follow the mountains so far? Why seek for gold, and why at last return to Shasta, instead of to his people and his possessions? My faith was surely shaken. So many years of practical life had taken something of the hero-worship out of my nature. There was no longer the haze of sovereignty about the head of this man, and yet I believe I loved him as truly as ever.

Little Shasta came dashing up with the hounds at