friend--I cannot."

"I am shot through the breast, and again through the side. You promised
that when I came to this pass, you would grant the liberation I seek in
death."

"I cannot. From any hand but mine may you find release."

"Very well" answered Dick, resolutely, "my own hand shall be given the
power to save my immortal soul." He wrote laboriously on a bit of paper,
"Rattlesnake Dick dies but never surrenders, as all true Britons do."

"Go, George," he said gently, "but first give me my pistol. I have in
my pocket here a letter from the sweetest of women. It says, 'I have
grieved but never despaired, for I have prayed to the Father that he
would restore you to the paths of rectitude, and I say faithfully, He
will save you. He sees in your heart a secret wish to be a better
man. 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all things shall be added
thereunto.' He will raise your head and make of you a new man'! I go to
Him, my brother." And, raising his gun, with a good woman's adored name
on his lips, he released his sorely tried heart from bondage into the
unknown.

Indian Vengeance

V

"Those brave old bricks of forty-nine!
What lives they lived! What deaths they died!
Their ghosts are many. Let them keep
Their vast possessions. The Piute,
The tawny warrior, will dispute
No boundary with these.........

--Joaquin Miller.

High water on the American came, usually, when the first warm rains
melted the snow on the mountains.

The placer miners toiled at furious pace all during the summer and fall.
The water, then not more than a rivulet, was deflected through flumes
from the river bed, so that all the sand of the bars could be put
through the sluices.

The men worked till the last possible moment in the narrow river bed,
only leaving in time to save their lives, and abandoning everything to
the sudden rush of the water. Their sluices, logs, flumes, water-wheels,
all their mining paraphernalia, sometimes even their living outfits,
were swept away in the floods.

The river was known to rise from 20 to 60 feet in 24 hours, in its
narrow and precipitous walls.

At flood time, then, we often went down to the river through the orchard
of big old cherry trees planted by my grandfather, to watch the mass
of wreckage rushing by. Great logs would go down end over end; mining
machinery caught in the limbs of uprooted trees; quantities of lumber,
and once a miner's bunk