Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/63



It was late in the day when we passed, on one side of the dusty road we had been travelling but a short distance, a newly-erected gallows, and a populous grave-yard on the other. Certain evidences, under the present order of things, of the nearness of civilization and a city.

Mount Shasta is not visible from the city. A long butte, black and covered with chapparal, lifts up before Yreka, shutting out the presence of the mountain.

It was a strange sort of inspiration that made the sheriff come out here to construct his gallows out in the light, as it were, from behind the little butte And full in the face of Shasta.

A strange sort of inspiration it was, and more beautiful, that made the miners bring the first dead out here from the camp, from the dark, and dig his grave here on the hill- side, full in the light of the lifted and eternal front of snow.

Dead men are even more gregarious than the living. No one lies down to rest long at a time alone, even in the wildest parts of the Pacific. The dead will come, if his place of rest be not hidden utterly, sooner or later, and even in the wildest places will find him out, and one by one lie down around him.

The shadows of the mountains in mantles of pine were reaching out from the west over the thronged busy little new-born city, as we entered its populous