The scalped and
skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his horse and held hideously
upright by a cross of wood behind his saddle, had passed, one night,
a slow and ghastly apparition, into camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had
been found anchored on the river-bed, disembowelled and filled with
stone and gravel. The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp
who fell into the enemy's hands was doomed.
Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to subside
in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps, dulled his
apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to become again
uppermost. He knew that the low bark tents, or wigwams, of the Indians
were hung with strips of dried salmon, and his whole being was new
centered upon an attempt to stealthily procure a delicious morsel. As
yet he had distinguished no other sign of life or habitation; a
few moments later, however, and grown bolder with an animal-like
trustfulness in his momentary security, he crept out of the thicket and
found himself near a long, low mound or burrow-like structure of mud and
bark on the river-bank. A single narrow opening, not unlike the entrance
of an Esquimau hut, gave upon the river. Martin had no difficulty in
recognizing the character of the building. It was a "sweathouse," an
institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes of California.
Half a religious temple, it was also half a sanitary asylum, was used as
a Russian bath or superheated vault, from which the braves, sweltering
and stifling all night, by smothered fires, at early dawn plunged,
perspiring, into the ice-cold river.
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