# Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 13

CHAPTER XIII.
A STORM IN THE SIERRAS.
IRGIN gold, like truth, lies at the bottom. It is a great task in the placer mines, as a rule, particularly in the streams, to get on the bed-rock to open a claim and strike the lead. When this is done the rest is simple enough. You have only to keep your claim open, to see that the drain is not clogged, the tail race kept open, and that the water does not break in and fill up your excavation by which you have reached the bed rock. All this the Prince and I had accomplished. The summer was sufficiently cool to be tolerable in toil ; the season was unusually healthy, and all was well.
At night, when the flush of the sun would be blown from the tree tops to the clouds, we two would sit at the cabin door in the gloaming, and look across and up, far up, into the steep and sable skirting forest of firs, and listen to the calls of the cat-bird, or the coyote lifting his voice in a plaintive murmur for his mate on the other side. ​
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The Doctor would sit there too, in silence, close at hand, and dream and forget the ways of man ; and, perhaps, think sadly, but certainly enough, there was one place, one narrow place, at last, where he would fit in and no one would come to disturb him.
Klamat would come in with a string of quails, sometimes, at dusk, or a venison saddle, a red fox or a badger, stand his gun in the corner with his club, and turn himself to rest close at hand.
Paquita would drop down from the woods on the hill above the cabin, the little belle and beauty of the camp. But she never spoke to the miners or any one, save to only answer them in the briefest way possible.
They hardly liked this ; and they hardly liked the Prince from the start, I think, anyhow. He was, as an expression of the time went, a little too " fine-haired. " He spoke too properly ; he never u got on any glo rious benders," with the western men, nor could he eat codfish, or talk about Boston, with the eastern. He took hold of no man s hand hastily.
I like that.
Paquita had a great deal to tell about Mount Shasta. She had been on the side beyond. In fact her home was there, she said, and she de scribed the whole land in detail. A country sloping off gradually toward the east and south; densely timbered, save little dimples of green prairies, alive with game, dotted down here and there, buried in the dark and splendid forests on the little trout ​
THE SIERRA 8. 1C3
streams that wound still and crooked through wood and meadow.
She had been out here on the Klamat on a visit, with her mother and others, the fall and winter before. She said they had come down from the lakes in canoes. She also insisted strongly that her father was a great chief of the Modocs and mountain Shastas.
Indians are great travellers, far greater than is generally believed, and it was quite reasonable to take that part of the young lady s story as literally true; but the part about her father being a great chief was set down as one of her innocent fictions by which she wished to dignify herself, and appear of some importance in the eyes of the Prince.
Still as there had been quite a sensation in camp about new mines in that direction, it was interesting to talk to one who had been through the country, and could give us some accurate account of it. After that, finding the Prince was interested enough to listen, she would take great pleasure in describing the country, character, and habits of the Indians, and the kind of game with which the forest abounded.
She would map out on the ground with a stick the whole country, as you would draw a chart on the black board.
The feeling against the Doctor had not yet blown over. It was pretty generally understood that the sheriff or a deputy from across the mountain would soon be over with a warrant for his app ​rehension.
Why not escape? There are some popular errors of opinion that are amusing. Men suppose that if a man is in the mountains he is safe, hid away, and secure ; that he has only to step aside in the brush and be seen no more.
As a rule, it is infinitely better to be in the heart of a city. Here was a camp of three thousand men. Each man knew the face of his neighbour. There was but one way to enter this camp, but one way to go out ; that way led to the city. We were in a sac, the further end of a cave, as it were. You could not go this way, or that, through the moun tains above. There were no trails; there was no food. You would get lost; you would starve.
Besides, there were wild beasts, and wilder men, ready to revenge the hundred massacres up and down the country, not unlike the one described. Here, in that day at least, if a man did wrong he could not hide. The finger of God pointed him out to all.
Late one September day it grew intensely sultry; there was a haze in the sky and a circle about the sun. There was not a breath. The perspiration came out and stood on the brow, even as we rested in the shadow of the pines. A singular haze ; such a day, it is said, as precedes earthquakes.
The black crickets ceased to sing; the striped lizards slid quick as ripples across the rocks, and birds went swift as arrows overhead, but uttered no cry. There was not a sound in the air nor on the earth. ​
Paquita came rushing down to the claim, pale and excited. She lifted her two hands above her head as she stood on the bank, and called to us to come up from the mine. u Come, she cried, "there will be a storm. The trees will blow and break against each other. There will be a flood, a sea, a river in the mountains. Come !" She swayed her body to and fro, and the trees began to sway above her on the hills, but not a breath had touched the mines.
Then it grew almost dark ; we fairly had to feel our way up the ladder. A big drop sank in the water close at hand, splashing audibly; the trees surged above us and began to snap like reeds.
There was a roar like the sea loud, louder. Nearer now the trees began to bend and turn and lick their limbs and trunks, interweave and smite and crush, until their tops were like one black and boiling sea.
Fast, faster, the rain in great warm drops began to strike us in the face, as we miners hastened up the hill to the shelter of the cabin. At the door we turned to look. The darkness of death was upon us ; we could hear the groans and the battling of the trees, the howling of the tempest, but all was dark ness, blackness, desolation. Lightning cleft the heavens.
A sheet of flame as if the hand of God had thrust out through the dark and smote the mountain side with a sword of fire.
And then the thunder shook the earth till it trembled, as if Shasta had been shaken ​loose and
broken from its foundation. No one spoke. The lightning lit the cabin like a bonfire. Klamat stood there in the cabin by his club and gun. There was in his face a grim delight. The Doctor lay on his face in his bunk, hiding his eyes in his two hands.
No one undressed that night in the camp.
The next morning the fury of the storm was over, but it was not yet settled. We ventured out and looked down into the stream. It was nearly large enough to float a steamer. The claim was filled up as perfectly as when we first took it from the hands of the Creator. Ten feet of water flowed swift and muddy over it towards the Klamat and the sea.
Logs, boards, shingles, rockers, toms, sluices, flumes, pans, riffles, aprons went drifting, bobbing, dodging down the angry river like a thousand eager swimmers.
The storm had stolen everything, and was rushing with his plunder straight as could be to the sea, as if he feared that dawn should catch him in the camp, and the miners come upon him to reclaim their goods.
Every man in the camp was ruined. No man had dreamed of this. Maybe a few had saved up a little fortune, but, as a rule, all their fortunes lay in the folds of the next few months. Every man had his burden now to bear. The mortgage on the farm, the home for the old, the orphans, the invalid ​sister !
Brave men ! they said nothing ; they set their teeth, looked things squarely in the face, but did not complain. One man, however, who watched the flood from a point on the other side and saw his flume swept away, swung his old slouched hat, danced a sort of savage hokee-pokee, and sang :
" O, everything is lovely, And the goose hangs high ! "
A strange song, indeed !
To them this disaster meant another weary winter in the mines disease, scurvy, death. Many could not endure it. They understood their claims could not be opened till another year, and set their faces for other mines which they had heard of, further on. Mining life is not unlike life at large.
We two had not saved much money. And what portion of that had I earned ? I could not well claim a great deal, surely. How much would be left when the debts were paid the butcher and the others ? True, the claim was valuable, but it had no value now not so much as a sack of flour. There were too many wanting to get away, and men had not yet learned the worth of a mine. Some times in these days new excitements, new diversions, would tap a camp, drain it dry, and not leave a soul to keep the coyotes from taking possession of the cabins.
"What will you do?" said the Prince to me one day, as we sat on the bank, wishing in vain for the water to ​subside.
u We cannot reach the bed-rock again till far into the next year. What will you do ?"
u May I stay with you ? "
The strong man reached me his two hands u As long as I live and you live, my little one, and there is a blanket to my name we will sleep under it together.
u We will leave this camp. I have hated it from the first. I have grown old here in a year. I cannot breathe in this narrow canon with its great walls against the clouds. We will go."