Down the Mother Lode Part 7

"It is the sheriff and his deputies. This morning George and I were on the Folsom stage. We were stopped by a deputy sheriff and sternly requested to alight. We entered into conversation with the gentleman of the law--whom I had met several times before" (with a grim smile), "and finally George, with due deference to authority, demanded to be shown the warrant for our arrest.

"Whilst the simple creature was fumbling for it, we opened fire and, springing from the top of the stage, escaped across Harmon Hill. The vain fellow carried only a derringer, and how was one little bullet to stop our race for liberty."

"Yet you returned here! That was madness."

"I heard of you and the longing to see you once more overcame every other feeling."

"Do not fear, I knew that they would come. What was that to pay for the chance of seeing you again. They can but put me in Auburn jail, and no locks can hold me except the s.h.i.+ning ones on this dear head. No prison can keep me till I am laid in that last one beneath the gra.s.s, and there I will wait for you dear love. I shall not hear the celestian singing till your sweet voice has joined the angel choir, and your two hands--see, I still carry the little mitts--shall open the door for me to Paradise, as they have held all of heaven for me on earth.

"It may be in that last court, the Great judge of all will look into my heart which strove to be honorable and will dismiss the accusations of mere, mortal man."

As usual, d.i.c.k escaped the jail and with George Taylor attempted to get away, but Fate had dealt him her last blow and on the scroll of his precarious and bitter life had written finis. A mile above Auburn they were overtaken by a.s.sessor George W. Martin and Deputy Sheriffs Crutcher and Johnston. In the terrible encounter which ensued Martin was instantly killed and d.i.c.k mortally wounded.

They rode more than a mile at a furious pace, from the scene of his last fight, before d.i.c.k lay down to die. George put him on his great riding cloak and spread a saddle blanket over him. Then when he read a fresh command in the highwayman's dark eyes he faltered.

"d.i.c.k, old friend--I cannot."

"I am shot through the breast, and again through the side. You promised that when I came to this pa.s.s, you would grant the liberation I seek in death."

"I cannot. From any hand but mine may you find release."

"Very well" answered d.i.c.k, resolutely, "my own hand shall be given the power to save my immortal soul." He wrote laboriously on a bit of paper, "Rattlesnake d.i.c.k dies but never surrenders, as all true Britons do."

"Go, George," he said gently, "but first give me my pistol. I have in my pocket here a letter from the sweetest of women. It says, 'I have grieved but never despaired, for I have prayed to the Father that he would restore you to the paths of rect.i.tude, and I say faithfully, He will save you. He sees in your heart a secret wish to be a better man. 'Seek ye first the kingdom of G.o.d, and all things shall be added thereunto.' He will raise your head and make of you a new man'! I go to Him, my brother." And, raising his gun, with a good woman's adored name on his lips, he released his sorely tried heart from bondage into the unknown.

Indian Vengeance

V

"Those brave old bricks of forty-nine!

What lives they lived! What deaths they died!

Their ghosts are many. Let them keep Their vast possessions. The Piute, The tawny warrior, will dispute No boundary with these.........

--Joaquin Miller.

High water on the American came, usually, when the first warm rains melted the snow on the mountains.

The placer miners toiled at furious pace all during the summer and fall.

The water, then not more than a rivulet, was deflected through flumes from the river bed, so that all the sand of the bars could be put through the sluices.

The men worked till the last possible moment in the narrow river bed, only leaving in time to save their lives, and abandoning everything to the sudden rush of the water. Their sluices, logs, flumes, water-wheels, all their mining paraphernalia, sometimes even their living outfits, were swept away in the floods.

The river was known to rise from 20 to 60 feet in 24 hours, in its narrow and precipitous walls.

At flood time, then, we often went down to the river through the orchard of big old cherry trees planted by my grandfather, to watch the ma.s.s of wreckage rus.h.i.+ng by. Great logs would go down end over end; mining machinery caught in the limbs of uprooted trees; quant.i.ties of lumber, and once a miner's bunk with sodden gray blanket and a wet and frantic squirrel upon it. I worried for days over the fate of that squirrel.

They tell the story of a Chinaman floating down upon a log.

"h.e.l.lo, John, where you go?" was shouted. John shook his head, sadly.

"Me no sabe! Maybe Saclimento--maybe San Flancisco. No got time talkee, now."

"Look, the water is up to the top of the old stone pier," said one of the others.

"Mammy Kate's 'ghost' would have a hard time haunting it now," I laughed. "He'd be under twenty feet of water."

"What ghost?"

"Why, the tollkeeper's, of the old bridge. The one who hated the Indians so."

"The Bear River tribe?"

"They were Diggers, but I think that n.o.body knew exactly which ones were guilty. It was a fine bridge, the first suspension bridge in Placer county."

"It was washed away in the floods during the winter of '61 and '62, wasn't it?"

"Yes and they built the new one a mile up the river at Rattlesnake Bar, where it still hangs."

"What about the tollkeeper?"

Here is the story--with a bit of a prologue.

Captain Ezekiel Merritt, one of the "Bear Flag" party in Sonoma, came in '49 to try his luck at mining on the Middle Fork of the American. His party came at last, through a deep canyon to a large bar on which they found among unmistakable evidences of a plundered camp both white man's and Indian's hair. A great ash heap containing calcined bones was undoubtedly the funeral pyre of white men and red men alike, and some yelling savages upon the upper bluff confirmed the tragedy which Captain Merritt's party had been too late to avert.

They drove the Indians away and Captain Merritt cut into the bark of an alder the name "Murderer's Bar," by which the place has been called ever since.

The Merritt party stayed to work the bar. Before the summer pa.s.sed the river swarmed with men, some of whom joined forces to make up mining companies. One of the rules of such a company: "Any shareholder getting drunk during the time he should be on duty, shall pay into the common treasury of the company a fine of one ounce of gold dust and shall forfeit all dividends during such time." These fines, in some instances, became so frequent as to cause a total disruption of the company.

The Indians returned to their villages in the hills. The foothill Indians were not a particularly intelligent lot. They were Diggers, so named on account of their habits of digging in the ground for roots, and the larva of various insects for food. Eggs of ants, and the maggots found in wasp's nests were considered great delicacies.

They also ate dried gra.s.shoppers and young clover plants cooked as greens. They ground acorns and manzanita berries into meal with the stone mortars and pestles so commonly found through the countryside and gathered and stored great caches of pine burrs full of nuts for the winter. They were not as a rule quarrelsome, but--.

"Good morning, Phineas. I have brought your grub from Auburn, and here is the bill."

It was a bright day in June and Phineas Longley, tollkeeper for the new suspension bridge on Whiskey Bar, had had a busy morning. There was a barbecue that day at the town on the other side, and a stream of people had come down the Whiskey Bar turnpike and crossed the bridge. It was getting warm and he was tired, and he read the bill gloomily: