ources. The laws are made to restrain such men; but on the border
there is no law enforced. So you see how powerful are the wicked there;
how powerless the weak, though never so well disposed.

In the far West, if an Indian is in your way, you have only to report
him to the Agent of the Indian Reservation. That is all you have to do.
He disappears, or dies. This Indian Agent is only too anxious to fill up
his wasting ranks of Indians. They are dying every day. And if they all
should die, sooner or later the fact may be known at Washington, and in
the course of a few years the Reservation and office would be abolished
together. And then each additional Indian contributes greatly to the
Agent's income, for each Indian must be fed and clothed--or at least,
the Agent is permitted to draw clothing, blankets and food for every
Indian brought upon the Reservation. As to the Indians receiving these
things, that is quite another affair.

Well, here were men wanting this land. Down yonder, far away to the
scorching South, at the edge of the level alkali lands, in a tule swamp,
where the Indians taken from the mountains were penned up and dying like
sheep in a corral, was a bold, enterprising Indian Agent who was
gathering in, under orders of his Government, all the Indians of
Northern California. He could appoint a hundred deputies, and authorize
them to bring in the Indians wherever found.

The two children--"the babes in the wood"--had been taken to the
Reservation; but being bold and active, they contrived to soon escape
and return to the mountains. Men whispered that the girl owed her escape
to the great and growing favor in which she was held by one of the
deputy agents, who, with his partner, a rough and coarse-grained man,
had their homes in this camp. The cabin of these two deputy agents,
Dosson and Emens, stood not far from that of old Forty-Nine. But so far
as I can remember, the old man and the newly appointed deputy agents had
always been at enmity.

This Dosson was certainly a bad man. He was in every sense of the word a
desperado, and so was his partner; just the men most wanted by the head
agent at the Reservation to capture and bring in Indians.

But whether this girl owed her escape or not to this ruffian, Dosson,
certain it is that on her return she avoided his cabin, and when not in
the woods, hovered about that of old Forty-Nine. This enraged Dosson
beyond degree. To add to his anger, she now began to show