The scalped and skinned dead body of Jack Trainer,tied on his horse and held hideously upright by a cross of wood behind his saddle,had passed,one night,a slow and ghastly apparition,into camp;the corpse of Dick Ryner had been found anchored on the river-bed,disembowelled and filled with stone and gravel.The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp who fell into the enemy's hands was doomed.
Elijah Martin remembered this,but his fears gradually began to subside in a certain apathy of the imagination,which,perhaps,dulled his apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to become again uppermost.He knew that the low bark tents,or wigwams,of the Indians were hung with strips of dried salmon,and his whole being was new centered upon an attempt to stealthily procure a delicious morsel.As yet he had distinguished no other sign of life or habitation;a few moments later,however,and grown bolder with an animal-like trustfulness in his momentary security,he crept out of the thicket and found himself near a long,low mound or burrow-like structure of mud and bark on the river-bank.
A single narrow opening,not unlike the entrance of an Esquimau hut,gave upon the river.Martin had no difficulty in recognizing the character of the building.It was a "sweathouse,"an institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes of California.Half a religious temple,it was also half a sanitary asylum,was used as a Russian bath or superheated vault,from which the braves,sweltering and stifling all night,by smothered fires,at early dawn plunged,perspiring,into the ice-cold river.The heat and smoke were further utilized to dry and cure the long strips of fish hanging from the roof,and it was through the narrow aperture that served as a chimney that the odor escaped which Martin had detected.He knew that as the bathers only occupied the house from midnight to early morn,it was now probably empty.He advanced confidently toward it.
He was a little surprised to find that the small open space between it and the river was occupied by a rude scaffolding,like that on which certain tribes exposed their dead,but in this instance it only contained the feathered leggings,fringed blanket,and eagle-plumed head-dress of some brave.He did not,however,linger in this plainly visible area,but quickly dropped on all fours and crept into the interior of the house.Here he completed his feast with the fish,and warmed his chilled limbs on the embers of the still smouldering fires.It was while drying his tattered clothes and shoeless feet that he thought of the dead brave's useless leggings and moccasins,and it occurred to him that he would be less likely to attract the Indians'attention from a distance and provoke a ready arrow,if he were disguised as one of them.
Crawling out again,he quickly secured,not only the leggings,but the blanket and head-dress,and putting them on,cast his own clothes into the stream.A bolder,more energetic,or more provident man would have followed the act by quickly making his way back to the thicket to reconnoitre,taking with him a supply of fish for future needs.But Elijah Martin succumbed again to the recklessness of inertia;he yielded once more to the animal instinct of momentary security.He returned to the interior of the hut,curled himself again on the ashes,and weakly resolving to sleep until moonrise,and as weakly hesitating,ended by falling into uneasy but helpless stupor.
When he awoke,the rising sun,almost level with the low entrance to the sweat-house,was darting its direct rays into the interior,as if searching it with fiery spears.He had slept ten hours.He rose tremblingly to his knees.Everything was quiet without;he might yet escape.He crawled to the opening.The open space before it was empty,but the scaffolding was gone.The clear,keen air revived him.As he sprang out,erect,a shout that nearly stunned him seemed to rise from the earth on all sides.He glanced around him in a helpless agony of fear.A dozen concentric circles of squatting Indians,whose heads were visible above the reeds,encompassed the banks around the sunken base of the sweat-house with successive dusky rings.Every avenue of escape seemed closed.
Perhaps for that reason the attitude of his surrounding captors was passive rather than aggressive,and the shrewd,half-Hebraic profiles nearest him expressed only stoical waiting.There was a strange similarity of expression in his own immovable apathy of despair.His only sense of averting his fate was a confused idea of explaining his intrusion.His desperate memory yielded a few common Indian words.He pointed automatically to himself and the stream.His white lips moved.
"I come--from--the river!"
A guttural cry,as if the whole assembly were clearing their throats,went round the different circles.The nearest rocked themselves to and fro and bent their feathered heads toward him.Ahollow-cheeked,decrepit old man arose and said,simply:--"It is he!The great chief has come!"
