oops the Captain began to cast eyes of favor on a comely young Indian
woman, the wife of a Pit River brave. The Captain had been sent to
civilize the Indians, and was not long in taking the woman under his
protection. The arrangement was agreeable to the woman, who preferred
the favor of the white chief to that of her dusky husband.

Time wore on and the government concluded to abandon the post, and
ordered Capt. Wagner and his company elsewhere. Of course, he could not
take the Indian woman with him, and she must be got rid of. The means
presented itself in the person of a soldier named Calvin Hall, whose
term of enlistment had expired. He proposed to Hall that if he would
take the woman off his hands he, the Captain, would give him a small
portable sawmill which the government had sent to the post to saw lumber
with which to build quarters, etc. The arrangement being agreeable to
Hall, the trade was made and the woman and sawmill passed to a different
ownership.

In the course of time Hall sold the sawmill and settled on a piece of
land not far from the present town of Lookout. Here the two full blood
children of the woman grew to manhood. Another child was born to the
woman, the father being a man named Wilson, with whom she lived during
one of her changes of lovers, for Mary (her Christian name) was a woman
of many loves. The half breed boy was fifteen years old, and probably by
reason of environment was not a model. The two full bloods, Frank and
Jim Hall, the names by which they were known, gradually became looked
upon as desperate characters. Their many misdeeds brought them into
prominence, and frequent arrests followed. But somehow Hall managed to
enable them to escape the vengeance of the law. This only served to make
them bolder in their misdeeds. Cattle were killed and horses mutilated,
merely because the owners had incurred their enmity. The school house in
the neighborhood was broken open, books destroyed and other vandal acts
committed. In fact, they became the terror of the neighborhood, the Hall
home being a place of refuge and shelter, and Hall a protector when
arrests followed their crimes.

This condition of affairs could not exist for long. When the law fails
to protect life and property, I have always observed that men find a way
to protect them. About a year and a half before the finale, a gentleman
living in Lookout visited Alturas and detailed the many misdeeds of
these men to me. One in parti