n,
began to creep and crawl through these dreadful dens of death, over the
sick and dying Indians. Long slimy, unnamed, and unknown worms crawled
up out of the earth, as if they could not wait for the victims to die.

The Indians were dying off by hundreds. They went to the officers and
complained. The officers ordered a double guard to be set. And that was
all.

You marvel that these young lieutenants could be so imperious and cruel?
It does seem past belief. But pardon just one paragraph of digression
while we recall the conduct of a younger class only last year on the
Hudson. To me the real question before the courts in the Whitaker case
is not whether this quiet stranger, with a tinge of black man's blood in
his veins, mutilated himself, or no. But the real question is, did they
or did they not, by their determined and persistent persecutions and
insults, drive him in a fit of desperation to do this in the hope of
pulling down ruin on the heads of all? This seems probable to me, and to
me is far more monstrous than if they had, in sudden anger, cut his
ears, or even cut his throat; and if these young bloods could so treat a
stranger there, standing at such a manifest disadvantage, what would
they not be capable of when they are, for the first time, clothed with
a little brief authority, away out on the savage edge of the world?

The water here, as the hot season came on, was something dreadful. It
was slimy with alkali. Little black worms knotted and twisted themselves
together at the bottom of the cup, like bunches of witch-woven
horse-hair. The Indians were dying of malaria. They were burning up with
the fever. And this was the only water these people, who had been used
to the fresh sweet snow-water of the Sierras, could have.

What could they do? They appealed to the officers. They were answered
with insult: "You must get used to it. You must get civilized."

These dying Indians began to fight and quarrel among themselves. Ah,
they were very wicked. They were quarrelsome as dogs; almost as
quarrelsome as Christians!

This was a small Paris in siege. It was Jerusalem surrounded by Titus.
Down there, dying as they were, a savage Simon and a degenerate John, as
in Jerusalem of old, led their followers against each other, even
across their dead that lay unburied in the mouldy death-pens and about
their dark and narrow doors, and slew each other as did God's chosen
people when besieged by the son of Vespasian.