A Drift from Redwood Camp | Page 2

his torpid
and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the
hollow of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously.
The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from
it a certain strength and intuition. He limped through the thicket not
unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer
out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight,
hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute.
It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor of
dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of hunger--it
indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as such--it
meant danger, torture, and death.
He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered senses.
Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally with the
surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by reckless
courage and unerring marksmanship. The frequent use of a casual
wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of its members had
kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the aborigines and stimulated
them to terrible and isolated reprisals. The scalped and skinned dead
body of Jack Trainer, tied on his horse and held hideously upright by a
cross of wood behind his saddle, had passed, one night, a slow and
ghastly apparition, into camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had been found
anchored on the river-bed, disembowelled and filled with stone and
gravel. The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp who
fell into the enemy's hands was doomed.
Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to subside
in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps, dulled his
apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to become again
uppermost. He knew that the low bark tents, or wigwams, of the

Indians were hung with strips of dried salmon, and his whole being was
new centered upon an attempt to stealthily procure a delicious morsel.
As yet he had distinguished no other sign of life or habitation; a few
moments later, however, and grown bolder with an animal-like
trustfulness in his momentary security, he crept out of the thicket and
found himself near a long, low mound or burrow-like structure of mud
and bark on the river-bank. A single narrow opening, not unlike the
entrance of an Esquimau hut, gave upon the river. Martin had no
difficulty in recognizing the character of the building. It was a
"sweathouse," an institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes
of California. Half a religious temple, it was also half a sanitary asylum,
was used as a Russian bath or superheated vault, from which the braves,
sweltering and stifling all night, by smothered fires, at early dawn
plunged, perspiring, into the ice-cold river. The heat and smoke were
further utilized to dry and cure the long strips of fish hanging from the
roof, and it was through the narrow aperture that served as a chimney
that the odor escaped which Martin had detected. He knew that as the
bathers only occupied the house from midnight to early morn, it was
now probably empty. He advanced confidently toward it.
He was a little surprised to find that the small open space between it
and the river was occupied by a rude scaffolding, like that on which
certain tribes exposed their dead, but in this instance it only contained
the feathered leggings, fringed blanket, and eagle- plumed head-dress
of some brave. He did not, however, linger in this plainly visible area,
but quickly dropped on all fours and crept into the interior of the house.
Here he completed his feast with the fish, and warmed his chilled limbs
on the embers of the still smouldering fires. It was while drying his
tattered clothes and shoeless feet that he thought of the dead brave's
useless leggings and moccasins, and it occurred to him that he would
be less likely to attract the Indians' attention from a distance and
provoke a ready arrow, if he were disguised as one of them. Crawling
out again, he quickly secured, not only the leggings, but the blanket and
head-dress, and putting them on, cast his own clothes into the stream. A
bolder, more energetic, or more provident man would have followed
the act by quickly making his way back to the thicket to reconnoitre,
taking with him a supply of fish for future needs. But Elijah Martin

succumbed again to the recklessness of inertia; he yielded once more to
the animal instinct of momentary security. He returned to the interior of
the hut, curled himself again on the ashes, and weakly resolving to
sleep until moonrise, and as weakly hesitating, ended by falling into
uneasy but helpless stupor.
When