Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/77

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Little shelves of bottles, glasses, and other requi sites of a well-regulated bar, sprang up on either side of the erect grizzly bear; and on the little shelf where the picture rested lay a brace of pistols, capped and cocked, within hand s reach of the cin namon-haired bar-keeper. This man was short, thick set, and of enormous strength, strength that had not remained untrained. He had short red hair, which stuck straight out from the scalp; one tooth out in front, and a long white scar across his narrow red forehead. He wore a red shirt, open at the throat, with the sleeves rolled up his brawny arms to the elbows.

All this seems to be before me now. I believe I could count and tell with a tolerable accuracy the number of glasses and bottles there were behind the bar.

Here is something strange. Everything that passed, everything that touched my mind through any source whatever, every form that my eyes rested upon, in those last two or three minutes before I broke down, remained as fixed and substantial in the memory, as shafts of stone.

Is it not because they were the last ? because the mind, in the long blank that followed, had nothing else to do but fix those last things firmly in their place ; something as the last scene on the land or the last words of friends are remembered when we go down on a long journey across the sea.

I have a dim and uncertain recollection of trying