The Colonel sent a long letter to his wife, and told me a lot of stuff to tell the other officers, of which I did not remember one-fourth.

Finally we were rigged up and ready to start, but we had a hard time to get away, for Dick Jones wanted me to tell Jim Johnson so and so.  Another had some word to send to a friend, whose name I had never heard before, and never thought of after I was out of sight.

After shaking hands all around, and Col.  Elliott telling me a lot of stuff to tell his wife and numerous other ladies which he knew I would not repeat the half of, for he knew that there was not another man in San Francisco that hated to try to talk to ladies as much as I did.  If we had not jarred loose and rode off I suppose we would have been there all day, and we would have had enough word to carry in our heads, that had it been written, would have made a book that Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary would be small compared with it, and again shaking hands we waved our hats at the many soldiers standing around and rode away.

CHAPTER XVII.

Discovery of Indians with stolen horses.—­We kill the Indians and return the property to its owners.—­Meeting of miners.—­In society again.

On our return trip we took the divide between the Klamath River and Yule Lake.  I had told Col.  Elliott before starting that I intended to pass west of the snowy butte instead of east of it, as we did coming in.

This butte has since been called Shasta Mountain, and it is one of the grandest sights that ever the eye of man beheld.  It flouts the skies with its peaks of everlasting snow, gleaming like a vast opal under the sunshine, or peeping out in rainbow-tinted glints, from among the rifts of the clouds that rake along its sides.  Often long streams of glittering white stretch from its peaks, far out into space, and these are called “snow-banners.”

My object in passing west of Shasta was to strike the headwaters of the Sacramento and follow that river to the city of Sacramento.  Late in the evening of the fifth day we struck a beautiful region, since known as the Shasta Valley.

While we were looking ahead through our field glasses and laying out our route for the next day, we discovered a great cloud of dust, which seemed to be not more than five or six miles away, and just beyond a low range of hills that we could overlook.  We secreted our horses and watched the dust, but we had not watched long before about sixty horses came in sight, driven by five Indians.  We could note that there were a number of mules in the band, and that two of the redskins carried rifles.

We were not long in making up our minds that this was stolen property, and that they had done murder and had taken the stock and were getting away as fast as they could.  Otherwise they would not have those rifles.