e must be in the vicinity of an
encampment. A camp-fire, with the ashes yet warm, proved that he was on
the trail of one of the nomadic tribes, but the declining sun warned
him to hasten home to his duty. When he at last reached the estuary, he
found that the building beside it was little else than a long hut, whose
thatched and mud-plastered mound-like roof gave it the appearance of a
cave. Its single opening and entrance abutted on the water's edge, and
the smoke he had noticed rolled through this entrance from a smouldering
fire within. Pomfrey had little difficulty in recognizing the purpose of
this strange structure from the accounts he had heard from "loggers" of
the Indian customs. The cave was a "sweat-house"--a calorific chamber
in which the Indians closely shut themselves, naked, with a "smudge" or
smouldering fire of leaves, until, perspiring and half suffocated, they
rushed from the entrance and threw themselves into the water before it.
The still smouldering fire told him that the house had been used that
morning, and he made no doubt that the Indians were encamped near by. He
would have liked to pursue his researches further, but he found he
had already trespassed upon his remaining time, and he turned somewhat
abruptly away--so abruptly, in fact, that a figure, which had evidently
been cautiously following him at a distance, had not time to get away.
His heart leaped with astonishment. It was the woman he had seen on the
rock.

Although her native dress now only disclosed her head and hands, there
was no doubt about her color, and it was distinctly white, save for the
tanning of exposure and a slight red ochre marking on her low forehead.
And her hair, long and unkempt as it was, showed that he had not erred
in his first impression of it. It was a tawny flaxen, with fainter
bleachings where the sun had touched it most. Her eyes were of a clear
Northern blue. Her dress, which was quite distinctive in that it was
neither the cast off finery of civilization nor the cheap "government"
flannels and calicoes usually worn by the Californian tribes, was purely
native, and of fringed deerskin, and consisted of a long, loose shirt
and leggings worked with bright feathers and colored shells. A necklace,
also of shells and fancy pebbles, hung round her neck. She seemed to
be a fully developed woman, in spite of the girlishness of her flowing
hair, and notwithstanding the shapeless length of her gaberdine-like
garment