A party of us went out to Carrick’s that night. There was a white blanket of snow gleaming in the moonlight. We formed a cordon around the house while the sheriff went up to the front door. There was a wild scream when Mrs. Carrick opened it. She had sensed our errand.
In a little hotel away up in the redwoods, many miles off, the father and son were taken next morning before dawn. They had stopped, in their flight, to have breakfast when the sheriff came up to them.
I did not see the trial, as I had left California before it came off, but the papers stated that Carrick and the Indian were hanged and the son was sentenced to twenty years. Over the grave of Scott, however, who had been my bunkmate and friend, I placed a headstone, the naïvete of which I am afraid I was unaware at the time. In 1915 I was told by a woman I met in California that in her early childhood up at Sissons, she used to sit for half a day at a stretch and wonder what it could mean, this piece of redwood, carved with the words:
Walter Scott [date, etc.]
MURDERED!!! R.I.P.!!!
Certain types thrive on rough life, and others deteriorate. They might be likened to iron and steel. The true frontiersman is like the common iron as it is dug from the ground. His feelings and sensibilities have never been refined; therefore, contact with the elemental things of life has no debasing effect upon him. The educated person is more like steel—something produced by being subjected to a great heat and which must be tempered to the climate. Hard steel breaks at a low temperature; so does human intelligence break under rough handling. Place a gentleman back in the primitive life and he is pretty sure to become a squaw man or a crook; only a person of refinement has the will and cleverness to be criminal.
I was getting scared. The murder of Scott had given me a jolt and I decided I had had enough of California. I had been playing poker every night until I owed the Chinese cook so much money that I had to sleep with him for two months and let him collect my pay. I thought this was about as low as I cared to go; so, picking up my traps one day, I started for San Francisco—and home.
A third-class ticket was sixty-five dollars—we called it the “emigrant train.” Peddlers sold pieces of canvas and straw mattresses at the station, and these we stretched across the seats in such a way as to make a fairly comfortable bed. The rule was that if sixty people got together they could go through as a “car” and be a law unto themselves. So we “fired out” the married men, the women, and the children, and made up our own crowd. We had neglected to get the full number, however, so the authorities put in twelve Chinamen, and I remember sleeping with my feet against the bald head of one all during the trip.
It had taken me seven days to get out West, but the trip back was thirteen. We were never certain where our car was to be from day to day. A freight train would come along and we would be hitched to it, jogging along slowly, only to be dropped at some God-forsaken flag station, with no way of knowing how long we were to wait. Then, of a sudden, would come on the express, whisk us up and whirl us along for several hundred miles.
At every stop a line of boys and girls passed through the car with cans of fresh milk, pies, cakes, etc., and, augmented by a basket I had brought from San Francisco, my food cost me only ten dollars for the whole trip. A passenger was rude to one of these children, knocking him over and spilling all of his milk. We promptly put him out of our car, back with the women and children.