Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 8 | Page 5

her anxiety becoming
unendurable, she packed an outfit on a burro and started on the trail.
From time to time she called his name, and "Miguel!" echoed sweetly
from hills and groves, but there was no other answer, save when an owl
would hoot. Rolled in a blanket she slept on lupin boughs, but was off
at peep of day again, calling--calling--high and clear among the
solitudes.
During the second day her burro gave a rasping bray, and a hee-haw
answered from the bush. It was Miguel's burro. He had come at last!
Leaping to her feet, in her impatience, she ran to meet him, and found
him lying on the earth, staring silently at the sky. All that day she sat
beside him, caressing his hand, talking, crying, bathing his face with
water from the marsh--the poison marsh--and it was not until sunset
that she could bring herself to admit that he was dead--had been dead
for at least two days.
She put the blanket over him, weighted it with stones, and heaped reeds
upon it; then she started for home. A wandering trader heard her story,
but years elapsed before any other settler entered Hunger valley. They
found her skeleton then in the weedy garden. The adobe stands
tenantless in the new village of Martinez, and the people have so often
heard that the ghosts of the Zamaconas haunt the place that they have
begun to disbelieve it.

THE WRATH OF MANITOU
The county called Kern, in California, lies mostly in a circular valley,
and long, long before the evil one had created the pale face it was the
home of a nation advanced in arts, who worshipped the Great Spirit in a
building with a lofty dome. But the bravery and wisdom of one of their
own people made them forget the Manitou and idolize the man who
seemed the most like him. They brought him to the temple and prayed
and sang to him, and held their sacred dances there, so angering God
that he rent the earth and swallowed them. Nothing was seen of this
people for years after, but their stone tools were left on neighboring
hill-sides. Manitou even poured water into the valley, and great
creatures sported in the inland sea.
But, ere long, he repented his anger, and, in a fit of impatience at what
he had done, he threw up quantities of earth that smoked with heat, and
thus created the Sierra Nevada, while he broke away the hills at the foot
of the lake, and the waters drained into the sea at the Golden Gate. This
again made dry land of the valley, and, opening the earth once more, he
released the captive tribe. The imprisoned people had not forgotten
their arts nor their boldness; they made the place blossom again; they
conquered other tribes, and Manitou declared them his chosen ones,
from whom alone he would accept sacrifice. But their chief became so
ambitious that he wanted to supplant the Manitou in the worship of the
people, and finally, in a lunacy of self-conceit, he challenged the god to
single combat.
Under pretence of accepting the challenge, the Great Spirit set the
offenders to wander through the desert until they reached a valley in the
Sierras, opposite Tehachapi, where he caused them to be exterminated
by a horde of savages from the Mojave desert. Then, in a fit of disgust
at refractory humanity, he evoked a whirlwind and stripped away every
living thing from the country of the savages, declaring that it should be
empty of human beings from that time forward. And it was so.

THE SPOOK OF MISERY HILL
Tom Bowers, who mined on Misery Hill, near Pike City, California,
never had a partner, and he never took kindly to the rough crowd about
the place. One day he was missing. They traced his steps through the
snow from his cabin to the brink of a great slope where he had been

prospecting, but there they vanished, for a landslide had blotted them
out. His body was exhumed far below and decently buried, yet it was
said that it was so often seen walking about the mouth of his old shaft
that other men avoided the spot.
Thriftless Jim Brandon, in a spasm of industry, began work on the
abandoned mine, and for a while he made it pay, for he got money and
squared accounts with his creditors; but after a time it appeared that
somebody else was working on the claim, for every morning he found
that the sluice had been tampered with and the water turned on. He
searched for the trespasser in vain, and told "the boys" that if they
called that joking it had grown tiresome.
One night he loaded his rifle, and,