Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/306

234 peeping out in rainbow-tinted glints, from among the rifts of the clouds that rake along its sides. Often long streams of glittering white stretch from its peaks, far out into space, and these are called "snow-banners."

My object in passing west of Shasta was to strike the headwaters of the Sacramento and follow that river to the city of Sacramento. Late in the evening of the fifth day we struck a beautiful region, since known as the Shasta Valley.

While we were looking ahead through our field glasses and laying out our route for the next day, we discovered a great cloud of dust, which seemed to be not more than five or six miles away, and just beyond a low range of hills that we could overlook. We secreted our horses and watched the dust, but we had not watched long before about sixty horses came in sight, driven by five Indians. We could note that there were a number of mules in the band, and that two of the redskins carried rifles.

We were not long in making up our minds that this was stolen property, and that they had done murder and had taken the stock and were getting away as fast as they could. Otherwise they would not have those rifles.

In those days Indians knew very little about using guns, and the mules we knew did not belong to them, for they did not have any mules, only as they could steal them from the emigrants.

We watched them until they came to a nice little stream, where they stopped, staked their saddle-horses out, and as it was almost night, we were confident from their movements that they were going into camp. Being