Continuing all night, we broke fast next morning at one of the stage stations, and after resting for an hour, once more started.
From this point the road followed the river, and in my anxiety to save some eight or ten miles of a track which I knew must be toilsome in the extreme to a female whose life had not been passed in this part of the country, I cut across the low range of hills by an old Indian trail. When, however, I observed some Indians approaching from our right, I recognized the want of caution I had displayed. Without calling my wife's attention to their dark specks in the distance, for they were a long way from us, I urged the horses into a sharp gallop, trusting they might not have seen us. But the red man has eyes quite as keen as the white ranger. They changed their course, with the evident purpose of cutting us off from the river.
My decision was rapidly formed.
Knowing we should soon mount a small ridge, and should on its far side be unseen by them for some time, we had no sooner crossed it, than I turned left into the ravine known as Six-mile Cañon. Pushing rapidly up this, we made our escape, and I did not mention the narrow chance we had run of an Indian fight, until my wife and myself were in sight of Virginia City.
This was, I may undoubtedly say, the first case in which I had turned tail on the red-skins without an interchange of hostile salutations.
On arriving at Susanville, my friends told me that the Indians had, the day before, killed Loomis Kellogg and a man of the name of Block, beside wounding Theodore Perdum, at a place more than half-way between Laithrop's Ranch and Mud Springs. They had been attacked by a party of Indians, which were generally in the vicinity of Honey Lake and closely upon the Humboldt. These had been baptized by the settlers as the Smoke-creek tribe, although by no means a tribe in the same sense as the Pah-utes and Modocs were.
This band of red-skins was composed of the offscourings of these two tribes who had either fled or been chased from them, simply because they were too scoundrelly and contemptibly degraded, in the eyes of their original brethren, to be trusted or consorted with.
Smoke-creek Sam was their chief. He had earned this pre-eminence by being, at long odds, not only the most blood-thirsty villain in this gang of red devils, but perhaps the most irredeemable ruffian the Indian history of the West can chronicle. The outrages in which he and his band had been involved, both at our immediate expense and that of all the settlers anywhere in our vicinity, were well-nigh numberless. During the past year, whether Uncle Sam's patience had been worn out by the accounts he had received of his namesake's rascally and bloody offences, or from a wish to make some capital in the East by bestowing a little affection on his Western nephew, it would be impossible to say. He, however, condescended to bestow a little attention upon Smoke-creek Sam. Some blue-coats had been sent out, and two military posts had been formed. These were, respectively, on Smoke and Granite Creeks, in the centre of the sweep of country exposed to this scoundrel's depredations.
For a short time, he became somewhat quieter; but as the blue-coats did not busy themselves in punishing him, he had again plucked up courage, and since the Pah-ute troubles had anew commenced, was, once more, on the war-trail.