owed him
to his final resting-place. After he was gone, grandma remembered that
she did not know his name in full, the land of his birth, nor the
address of his people. Expecting his recovery, she had not troubled him
with questions, and the few trinkets in his carpet bag yielded no
identifying clue. So he lies in a nameless grave, like countless other
youth of that period.

We had patients of every type, those who were appreciative and
grateful, and those who rebelled against confinement, and swore at the
pain which kept sleep from their eyes, and hurled their things about
regardless of consequences. The most trying were the chronic grumblers,
who did not know what they wanted, nor what they ought to have, and
adopted the moody refrain:

But the happy times are over,
I've only grief and pain,
For I shall never, never see
Susannah dear again.

The entrance of Georgia and myself would occasionally turn their
thoughts into homeward channels, and make them reminiscent of their
little children and loved ones "back in the States." Then, again, our
coming would set them to talking about our early disaster and such
horrible recounts of happenings in the snow-bound camps that we would
rush away, and poor Georgia would have distressing crying spells over
what we had heard.

At first no tears dimmed my eyes, for I felt, with keen indignation,
that those wounding tales were false; but there came hours of suffering
for me later, when an unsympathetic soldier, nicknamed "Picayune
Butler," engaged me in conversation and set me to thinking.

He was a great big man with eyes piercing as a hawk's, and lips so thin
that they looked like red lines on his face, parting and snapping
together as he repeated the horrible things he had read in _The
California Star._ He insisted that the Donner Party was responsible for
its own misfortune; that parents killed their babies and ate their
bodies to keep themselves alive; cut off the heads of companions and
called them good soup bones; and were as thievish as sneaking Indians,
even stealing the strings from the snowshoes of those who had come to
their rescue. He maintained that Keseberg had murdered my mother and
mutilated my dead father's body; and that he himself felt that the
miserable wretches brought from starvation were not worth the price it
had cost to save them.

Too young, too ignorant, and too distressed to disprove the accusations
or resent his individual v