ight 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 discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his women
buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the force of the
disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the wisdom of the tribe.
That summer they told me all except the names of the Three.

Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall
have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what Winnenap's will
be like: worth going to if one has leave to live in it according to his
liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth and
jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no hymn-book heaven, but the
free air and free spaces of Shoshone Land.

JIMVILLE--A BRET HARTE TOWN

When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only
safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out
untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of
more tales, and better ones.

You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like
the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about
those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch.

Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type
of a half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed. It is said
of Jimville that getting away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population; the fact is that most have been
drawn there by some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would
deny the difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder, I
who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor body.
Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from anywhere in
particular. North or south, after the railroad