ers, for the
country was infested with Indians. The swift stream at the foot of the
hill, now supplying power for a grist-mill, was full of salmon that ran
up through the Kishacoquillas from the blue Juniata. The savages
begrudged the settlers these fish and the game that abounded in the
rough mountains; but the settlers had come to cultivate the rich land
extending for twelve miles between the mountain walls.

The form of many a Californian now rests in that cemetery on the hill. A
few years after the burial of the murdered Cummins, the body of Henry
Francis was gathered to his fathers, and, near by, lie the bodies of
four of his brothers,--all Californians. The staid Amish farmers and
their subdued women, in outlandish, Puritanical garb, pass along the
road unstirred by the romance and glamour buried in those graves. Dead
men tell no tales! Else there were no need that pen of mine should
snatch from oblivion this tale of California.

More than thirty-five years have passed since my father, returning from
the scene of Cummins' murder, related the circumstances. With Mat
Bailey, the stage-driver, with whom Cummins had traveled that fatal day,
he had ridden over the same road, had passed the large stump which had
concealed the robbers, and had become almost an eye-witness of the whole
affair. My father's rehearsal of it fired my youthful imagination. So it
was like a return to the scenes of boyhood when, thirty-six years after
the event, I, too, traveled the same road that Cummins had traveled and
heard from the lips of Pete Sherwood, stage-driver of a later
generation, the same thrilling story. The stump by the roadside had so
far decayed as to have fallen over; but it needed little imagination to
picture the whole tragedy. In Sacramento I looked up the files of the
_Daily Record Union_, which on Sept. 3, 1879, two days after the event,
gave a brief account of it. There was newspaper enterprise for you! An
atrocious crime reported in a neighboring city two days afterward! Were
such things too common to excite interest? Or was it felt that the
recital of them did not tend to boom the great State of California?

CHAPTER II

The Graniteville Stage

On that fateful first of September, 1879, the stage left Graniteville,
as usual, at six o'clock in the morning. Graniteville, in Eureka
Township, Nevada County, is the Eureka South of early days. The stage
still makes the daily trip over the mountains; but the glamo