is real name--was far from being
unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish, and
lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar misfortune
that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity were the
dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His submissive gentleness,
his unquestioned modesty, his half refinement, and his amiable exterior
consequently availed him nothing against the fact that he was missed
during a raid of the Digger Indians, and lied to account for it; or that
he lost his right to a gold discovery by failing to make it good against
a bully, and selfishly kept this discovery from the knowledge of the
camp. Yet this weakness awakened no animosity in his companions, and it
is probable that the indifference of the camp to his fate in this final
catastrophe came purely from a simple forgetfulness of one who at that
supreme moment was weakly incapable.

Such was the reputation and such the antecedents of the man who, on the
15th of March, 1856, found himself adrift in a swollen tributary of the
Minyo. A spring freshet of unusual volume had flooded the adjacent river
until, bursting its bounds, it escaped through the narrow, wedge-shaped
valley that held Redwood Camp. For a day and night the surcharged river
poured half its waters through the straggling camp. At the end of that
time every vestige of the little settlement was swept away; all that was
left was scattered far and wide in the country, caught in the hanging
branches of water-side willows and alders, embayed in sluggish pools,
dragged over submerged meadows, and one fragment--bearing up Elijah
Martin--pursuing the devious courses of an unknown tributary fifty miles
away. Had he been a rash, impatient man, he would have been speedily
drowned in some earlier desperate attempt to reach the shore; had he
been an ordinary bold man, he would have succeeded in transferring
himself to the branches of some obstructing tree; but he was neither,
and he clung to his broken raft-like berth with an endurance that
was half the paralysis of terror and half the patience of habitual
misfortune. Eventually he was caught in a side current, swept to the
bank, and cast ashore on an unexplored wilderness.

His first consciousness was one of hunger that usurped any sentiment
of gratitude for his escape from drowning. As soon as his cramped limbs
permitted, he crawled out of the bushes in search of food. He did
not know whe