However, I chanced to be out with a party of the Rangers, on our way to the Humboldt River. We were near Black Rock, when we happened to meet an old Pah-ute Indian with several squaws, possibly or not, his own property. There was an appearance of a sort of Mormon respectability about the wrinkled red-skin, which at the moment impressed me, to a certain extent, favorably. Feeling this, I stepped up to him for the purpose of speaking. Judge what my astonishment was, when, drawing near him, to notice that he was smoking a pipe which I positively remembered as having been in the possession of the General.
There could not be the slightest mistake in this fact.
It was much too costly a pipe to have come into the possession of any Indian, save as a present, or by the more usual means in which the red-skin may acquire such property. My readers will very readily understand what such means are. Wright had himself told me how highly he valued this pipe. It had been presented to him by a dear friend, who was at this time dead. There must necessarily have been but small probability that it should have been a voluntary gift to the old Pah-ute.
Taking it at once from him, I demanded "where" he "got it."
"Me heap find em," was his leisurely reply. "Injin no steal 'em."
By this time, Bill Dow and several of the other Rangers had joined us. Dow also had happened to notice the pipe in the General's possession. With an angry imprecation, he exclaimed:
"Yer lie, yer red devil!" Then turning to me, he said: "Mose! as sure as God's in Heaven, that 'ere cuss has had a hand in killing Wright, for sartin. I reckon we'd jist better go over to Pabla, and look arter his party. Not, Cap! as I wants to dictate to yer. Only knowing as how the Gineral was a real friend of your'n, I thought, perhaps—"
"Thought!" I cried out, "Dow, when you know you are right."
"I'm dead sartin of it," he muttered between his teeth.