se gone together. It was as if the sun had gone
down for Forty-nine forever. There was no sun or moon or stars, or any
thing that shines in the mountains any more for him. His had been a
desolate life all the long years he had delved away into the mountain at
his tunnel. No man had taken his hand in friendship for many and many a
year.

The man now nailed up his cabin door--an idle task, perhaps, for men
instinctively avoided it, and the trail of late took a cut across the
spur of the hill rather than pass by his door. But somehow the old man
felt that he might not be back soon. And as men had kept away from that
cabin while he was there, he did not feel that they should enter it in
his absence.

One evening in the hot, sultry summer, old Forty-nine rode down from the
mountain into the great valley, following the trail taken by the lines
of chained captives, and set his face for the Reservation.

At a risk of repetition, let us look at this Reservation. The government
had ordered a United States officer, of the rank of lieutenant, to set
apart a Reservation for the Indians on land not acquired and not likely
to be desired by the white settlers, and to gather the Indians together
there and keep them there by force, if force should be required. This
young man established a Reservation on the border of a tule lake, shut
in by a crescent of low sage-brush hills. The Indian camp was laid out
on the very edge of this alkali lake. The crescent of sage-brush hills
of a mile in circuit, reaching back and almost around the Reservation,
was mounted at three points by cannon, ready to sweep the camp below. On
this circuit of hills, healthy and pleasant enough the officers and
soldiers had their quarters. Down in the damp, deadly valley, on the
edge of the alkali lake, the newly appointed Indian Agent, with a
tremendous appropriation to be expended in building houses and
establishing the Indians in their new homes, built the village. It was
made up of two rows of low, one-story, one-room huts. Two big lamps hung
in the one street; and from lamp to lamp before the doors of the little
huts with earthen floors and turf-covered roofs, paced soldiers night
and day.

These houses were damp and dismal from the first. Soon they began to be
mouldy; fungi and toadstools and the like began to grow up in the
corners and out of the logs. Little shiny reptiles, in the long hot
rainy days that followed, and worms and all sorts of hideous vermi