The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-01-07

hand; he might gaze longingly at merry picnic party on a timber pile feasting on watermelon, but no Juicy morsel was ever rendered him. His own sex repudiated him utterly; did he approach a knot of the sex whom his garb travestied, they flouted him and moved away, laughing; the children of both sexes and two races jeered at him with the needless barbarity of youth.
 One fortunate day he acquired a stray dog, a vicious, mongrel cur, and thence forth the two outeasts were .inseparable. Together they were an-hungered; to- gether they endured the gibes, and
 sometimes the missiles, of their deri-
 ders; and together they cuddled at night for mutuali warmth. Together they not infrequently came to our back
 door, and the animal retired depreca-
 tingly to a corner,, while his incongru-
 ously garbed master sawed wood or split kindlings. But when the task was
 done he came forth promptly to share
 the compensating ration and unfailing-
 ly got his share, whether the dole were
 meagre or abundant. Often then the
 man threw himself down upon the
 sand, with his back propped against a
 sun-heated powder at the corner of our
 fence, and lay there for hours, his gaze
 fixed upon the far horizon, while facing
 him sat the dog, alert at his slightest
 movement, its amber orbs-like many
 CUTS, it had beautiful eyes-fxed stead
 fastly upon him. It was a strange
 landscape that Charley's stoic gaze
 ranged over. Far below him. the can-
 yon wound for miles, like writhing
 serpent, before it debouched into the
 desert, whence the camel trains came
 up frorn Fort Churchill, laden with salt
 and borax for the reduction works, and where, of afternoons, the sand-storms
 wa!tZed gayly in the sun, in couples and
 trios, travelling about In swaying hour
 glass columns that reached from earth to sky. In all the immense prospect shert. were but two things-the brilliant
 concave vault and the bare brown
 earth, scared, upheaved and contorted by the thfoes of world birth. But in richness of coloring, ever varying and ever beautiful effects of passing cloud shadows and vast, solemn grandeur, that scene has no equal in any land.
 Whether or not any of it's profound, deathlike peace entered the Piute soul,
 
 lived long in the face of it without
 growing to feel fatalistic resignation stealing over his spirit.
 As time wore on Charley and his dog became such familiar figures to the Comstockers that they ceased to glance, a second time at their pathetic gro- tesueness, and the children gave over tormenting them.
 His punishment was to him what ex- communication must have been to it's victims ir the middle ages. Nothing is so abhorrent to the savage as solitude;
 and Charley grew abject, dropping, pre- maturely old, while his dog grew daily more ill-tempered and disreputable. But fate's most crushing blow was yet to fall. One day an irate toll-gate keeper shot his dog, caught in the very act of marauding among the white mans chickens. Over the body of his
 slain companion Charley wept the only tears he was ever known to shed, and bore 1t off iii his arms, bowed, deso- late figure slowly fading from ken against ashen plain and ultramarine sky.
 The pariah waAtseen no more in the haunts of men, and It was long after when prospectors found his skeleton, still cased in the. corroded steels of the old hoopskirt. None could know how he met his end nor, through how many hours or days of thirst and anguish the outcast had wrestled alone with the grim conqueror of all. As the beast dieth, so dies the Indian; and Charley had perchance not fared much worse at the end than others of his race-Argo- naut. }s