as full
of game as a park. No lonelier or more isolated place than this on earth. We walked about and viewed our new estates. The mules and ponies rolled in the rich grass, or rested in the sun with drooping heads and half-closed eyes.
Even the invalid Doctor seemed to revive in a most sudden and marvellous way. He saw that no white man s foot had ever trod the grasses of this valley; that there we might rest and rest and never rise up from fear. He could trust the wall of pine that environed us. It was impassable. He stood before an alder-tree that leaned across the silent, crooked little stream, and with his sheath-knife cut this one word : HOME.
A little way from here Paquita showed us another opening in the forest. This was a wider valley, with warm sulphur and soda springs in a great crescent all around the upper rim. Here the elk would come to winter, she said ; and hence we could never want for meat. The earth and atmosphere were kept warm here from the eternal springs ; and grass, she said, was fresh and grew the winter through.
This is the true source of the stream which the white men call Soda; the proper Indian name of which is Numken; arid here we built our cabin, reared a fortress against the approaching winter without delay, for every night his sentries were coming down bolder and bolder about the camp.
This was the famous " Lost Cabin." I
