A Drift from Redwood Camp | Page 3

he awoke, the rising sun, almost level with the low entrance to
the sweat-house, was darting its direct rays into the interior, as if
searching it with fiery spears. He had slept ten hours. He rose
tremblingly to his knees. Everything was quiet without; he might yet
escape. He crawled to the opening. The open space before it was empty,
but the scaffolding was gone. The clear, keen air revived him. As he
sprang out, erect, a shout that nearly stunned him seemed to rise from
the earth on all sides. He glanced around him in a helpless agony of
fear. A dozen concentric circles of squatting Indians, whose heads were
visible above the reeds, encompassed the banks around the sunken base
of the sweat-house with successive dusky rings. Every avenue of
escape seemed closed. Perhaps for that reason the attitude of his
surrounding captors was passive rather than aggressive, and the shrewd,
half-Hebraic profiles nearest him expressed only stoical waiting. There
was a strange similarity of expression in his own immovable apathy of
despair. His only sense of averting his fate was a confused idea of
explaining his intrusion. His desperate memory yielded a few common
Indian words. He pointed automatically to himself and the stream. His
white lips moved.
"I come--from--the river!"
A guttural cry, as if the whole assembly were clearing their throats,
went round the different circles. The nearest rocked themselves to and
fro and bent their feathered heads toward him. A hollow-cheeked,
decrepit old man arose and said, simply:--
"It is he! The great chief has come!"
. . . . . .
He was saved. More than that, he was re-created. For, by signs and

intimations he was quickly made aware that since the death of their late
chief, their medicine-men had prophesied that his perfect successor
should appear miraculously before them, borne noiselessly on the river
FROM THE SEA, in the plumes and insignia of his predecessor. This
mere coincidence of appearance and costume might not have been
convincing to the braves had not Elijah Martin's actual deficiencies
contributed to their unquestioned faith in him. Not only his inert
possession of the sweat-house and his apathetic attitude in their
presence, but his utter and complete unlikeness to the white
frontiersmen of their knowledge and tradition--creatures of fire and
sword and malevolent activity-- as well as his manifest dissimilarity to
themselves, settled their conviction of his supernatural origin. His
gentle, submissive voice, his yielding will, his lazy helplessness, the
absence of strange weapons and fierce explosives in his possession, his
unwonted sobriety--all proved him an exception to his apparent race
that was in itself miraculous. For it must be confessed that, in spite of
the cherished theories of most romances and all statesmen and
commanders, that FEAR is the great civilizer of the savage barbarian,
and that he is supposed to regard the prowess of the white man and his
mysterious death-dealing weapons as evidence of his supernatural
origin and superior creation, the facts have generally pointed to the
reverse. Elijah Martin was not long in discovering that when the Minyo
hunter, with his obsolete bow, dropped dead by a bullet from a viewless
and apparently noiseless space, it was NOT considered the lightnings
of an avenging Deity, but was traced directly to the ambushed rifle of
Kansas Joe, swayed by a viciousness quite as human as their own; the
spectacle of Blizzard Dick, verging on delirium tremens, and riding
"amuck" into an Indian village with a revolver in each hand, did NOT
impress them as a supernatural act, nor excite their respectful awe as
much as the less harmful frenzy of one of their own medicine-men;
they were NOT influenced by implacable white gods, who relaxed only
to drive hard bargains and exchange mildewed flour and shoddy
blankets for their fish and furs. I am afraid they regarded these raids of
Christian civilization as they looked upon grasshopper plagues, famines,
inundations, and epidemics; while an utterly impassive God washed his
hands of the means he had employed, and even encouraged the faithful
to resist and overcome his emissaries--the white devils! Had Elijah

Martin been a student of theology, he would have been struck with the
singular resemblance of these theories-- although the application
thereof was reversed--to the Christian faith. But Elijah Martin had
neither the imagination of a theologian nor the insight of a politician.
He only saw that he, hitherto ignored and despised in a community of
half-barbaric men, now translated to a community of men wholly
savage, was respected and worshipped!
It might have turned a stronger head than Elijah's. He was at first
frightened, fearful lest his reception concealed some hidden irony, or
that, like the flower-crowned victim of ancient sacrifice, he was exalted
and sustained to give importance and majesty to