nes all over and about
the door and chimney of his cabin, till men said it looked like a
spider-web.

But old Forty-nine only bored deeper and deeper into the spur of the
mountain, and paid but little attention to any of the changes that went
on around him. He had been working in that tunnel alone for nearly
twenty-five years. He was a man with a history--men said a murderer. He
shunned men, and men shunned him. Was he rich? He professed to be very
poor; men said he must be worth a million. Would a man work on
twenty-five years in one tunnel, and all alone, for nothing? But if
rich, why did he remain?

Still further down, and quite on the edge of the valley, stood another
cabin. And this was quite overgrown with vines, and was quite hidden
away in a growth of pines that gathered over it. Then there was an
undergrowth of fruit trees that grew inside the fence and about the
lonely porch. On this porch had sat, for years and years, a tawny,
silent old woman. She was sickly--had neither wealth, wit nor
beauty--and so, so far as the world went, was left quite alone.

But there was another and an all-sufficient reason why neither man or
woman came that way. She was an Indian. Do not imagine this a wild
Indian woman. Indian she was; but remember, the Catholics had more than
half civilized nearly all the native Californians long before we
undertook to kill them.

This Indian woman would have been called by strangers a Mexican woman.
She was very religious, and had imbued her boy with all her beautiful
faith and simple piety.

I know that the spectacle of an old Indian woman and her "half-breed"
son, represented as the morality and religion of a camp made up of
"civilized" Saxons, will seem somewhat novel to you. But I knew this
Indian boy and his mother well, and know every foot of the ground I
intend to go over, and every fact I propose to narrate. And if you are
not prepared to receive this as truth, I prefer you to close this page
right here.

To make a moment's digression, with your permission, let me state
briefly and frankly, once for all, that the only really religious,
unquestioning and absolutely devout Christians I ever met in America are
the Indians. I know of no other people so faithful and so blindly true
to their belief, outside of the peasantry of Italy. Be their beautiful
faith born of ignorance or what, I do not say. I simply assert that it
exists. There is no devotion so true as that of a converted Ind