Only one consolation was left us.  In the middle of the defile stood an overland station, where we were to get fresh horses.  The next stage was twenty miles long.  If we were attacked in force, we might manage to run it, almost the whole way, unless the Indians succeeded in shooting one of our team,—­the coup they always attempt.

I have no doubt we were ambushed at several points in that defile, but our perfect preparation intimidated our foes.  The Indian is cruel as the grave, but he is an arrant coward.  He will not risk being the first man shot, though his band may overpower the enemy afterward.

At last we turned the corner around which the station-house should come in view.

A thick, nauseous smoke was curling up from the site of the buildings.  We came nearer.  Barn, stables, station-house,—­all were a smouldering pile of rafters.  We came still nearer.  The whole stud of horses—­a dozen or fifteen—­lay roasting on the embers.  We came close to the spot.  There, inextricably mixed with the carcasses of the beasts, lay six men, their brains dashed out, their faces mutilated beyond recognition, their limbs hewn off,—­a frightful holocaust steaming up into our faces.  I must not dwell on that horror of all senses.  It comes to me now at high noonday with a grisly shudder.

* * * * *

After that, we toiled on twenty miles farther with our nearly dying horses; a hundred miles more of torturing suspense on top of that sight branded into our brains before we gained Ruby Valley, at the foot of the Humboldt Mountains, and left the last Goshoot behind us.

The remainder of our journey was horrible by Nature only, without the atrocious aid of man.  But the past had done its work.  We reached Washoe with our very marrows almost burnt out by sleeplessness, sickness, and agony of mind.  The morning before we came to the silver-mining metropolis, Virginia City, a stout, young Illinois farmer, whom we had regarded as the stanchest of all our fellow-passengers, became delirious, and had to be held in the stage by main force. (A few weeks afterward, when the stage was changing horses near the Sink of Carson, another traveller became suddenly insane, and blew his brains out.) As for myself, the moment that I entered a warm bath, in Virginia City, I swooned entirely away, and was resuscitated with great difficulty after an hour and a half’s unconsciousness.

We stopped at Virginia for three days,—­saw the California of ’49 reenacted in a feverish, gambling, mining town,—­descended to the bottom of the exhaustlessly rich “Ophir” shaft,—­came up again, and resumed our way across the Sierra.  By the mere act of crossing that ridge and stepping over the California line, we came into glorious forests of ever-living green, a rainbow-affluence of flowers, an air like a draught from windows left open in heaven.