mother
night, with a superstitious trust, and refuse to take precaution till dawn.
I knew every foot of the ground. It was five miles to the Ferry, where had been the strongest house of the whites ; I wished to go there and see first how things stood, now that I was so near. We pushed down the valley and left the Indians singing and dancing over their achievements. They did not dream that there was a white man within a hundred miles.
The houses were all burned. The ferry-boat was still chained to the bank, and in the boat lay a naked corpse with the head severed from the body.
We sat down in the boat, eat the last of our scant provisions and prepared to return. The excitement now being over, with the seventy-five miles of wilderness before us, I began to feel uneasy. We were in the " Valley of Death." Desolation was around us. Half-burnt houses were passed here and there, and now and then in the grey dawn we could see the smoke of Indian camps in the edge of the wood and along the river-banks.
We made a detour to avoid the large camp at the entrance of the valley and toiled up the mountain in silence.
Before noon we struck the route by which we entered, and on the edge of Bear Valley came sud denly upon two squaws who were on their way there to dig klara. This is the root of the mountain lily. It is a large white substance like a potato, with grains growing on the outside like Indian
