they always attempt.

I have no doubt we were ambushed at several points in that defile, but
our perfect preparation intimidated our foes. The Indian is cruel as the
grave, but he is an arrant coward. He will not risk being the first man
shot, though his band may overpower the enemy afterward.

At last we turned the corner around which the station-house should come
in view.

A thick, nauseous smoke was curling up from the site of the buildings.
We came nearer. Barn, stables, station-house,--all were a smouldering
pile of rafters. We came still nearer. The whole stud of horses--a dozen
or fifteen--lay roasting on the embers. We came close to the spot.
There, inextricably mixed with the carcasses of the beasts, lay six men,
their brains dashed out, their faces mutilated beyond recognition, their
limbs hewn off,--a frightful holocaust steaming up into our faces. I
must not dwell on that horror of all senses. It comes to me now at high
noonday with a grisly shudder.

* * * * *

After that, we toiled on twenty miles farther with our nearly dying
horses; a hundred miles more of torturing suspense on top of that sight
branded into our brains before we gained Ruby Valley, at the foot of the
Humboldt Mountains, and left the last Goshoot behind us.

The remainder of our journey was horrible by Nature only, without the
atrocious aid of man. But the past had done its work. We reached Washoe
with our very marrows almost burnt out by sleeplessness, sickness, and
agony of mind. The morning before we came to the silver-mining
metropolis, Virginia City, a stout, young Illinois farmer, whom we had
regarded as the stanchest of all our fellow-passengers, became
delirious, and had to be held in the stage by main force. (A few weeks
afterward, when the stage was changing horses near the Sink of Carson,
another traveller became suddenly insane, and blew his brains out.) As
for myself, the moment that I entered a warm bath, in Virginia City, I
swooned entirely away, and was resuscitated with great difficulty after
an hour and a half's unconsciousness.

We stopped at Virginia for three days,--saw the California of '49
reenacted in a feverish, gambling, mining town,--descended to the bottom
of the exhaustlessly rich "Ophir" shaft,--came up again, and resumed our
way across the Sierra. By the mere act of crossing that ridge and
stepping over the California line, we came into glorious forests of
ever-living