The breech-loading
rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were
ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while
the Indians lay utterly invisible.
They were familiar with byways
both over and under ground, and could at any time sink suddenly out of
sight like squirrels among the loose boulders. Our bewildered
soldiers heard them shooting, now before, now behind them, as they
glided from place to place through fissures and subterranean passes,
all the while as invisible as Gyges wearing his magic ring. To judge
from the few I have seen, Modocs are not very amiable-looking people
at best. When, therefore, they were crawling stealthily in the gloomy
caverns, unkempt and begrimed and with the glare of war in their eyes,
they must have seemed very demons of the volcanic pit.
Captain Jack's cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It
measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is
littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and
startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The
sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and
eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.
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