But this must not be pushed too far. All
else failing, he can hide. Winnenap' did this the time of the measles
epidemic. Returning from his yearly herb gathering, he heard of it at
Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not to be found, nor did he
return to his own place until the disease had spent itself, and half
the children of the campoodie were in their shallow graves with beads
sprinkled over them.

It is possible the tale of Winnenap's patients had not been strictly
kept. There had not been a medicine-man killed in the valley for twelve
years, and for that the perpetrators had been severely punished by the
whites. The winter of the Big Snow an epidemic of pneumonia carried off
the Indians with scarcely a warning; from the lake northward to the
lava flats they died in the sweathouses, and under the hands of the
medicine-men. Even the drugs of the white physician had no power.

After two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to consider
the remissness of their medicine-men. They were sore with grief
and afraid for themselves; as a result of the council, one in every
campoodie was sentenced to the ancient penalty. But schooling and native
shrewdness had raised up in the younger men an unfaith in old usages,
so judgment halted between sentence and execution. At Three Pines the
government teacher brought out influential whites to threaten and cajole
the stubborn tribes. At Tunawai the conservatives sent into Nevada for
that pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of Paiute orators,
to harangue his people. Citizens of the towns turned out with food and
comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.

But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
alleviation. One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed the
medicine-men. Winnenap' expected it, and for days walked and sat a
little apart from his family that he might meet it as became a Shoshone,
no doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred. When finally three men
came and sat at his fire without greeting he knew his time. He turned a
little from them, dropped his chin upon his knees, and looked out over
Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The women went into the wickiup and
covered their heads with their blankets.

So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from
killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work
by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp
hatchet-stroke disch