EL CAPITAN.
Ah, there were tracks in the sand, his tracks, but her call was answered only by the echo of her own sad voice. A new fracture marked a recent cleavage in the rocks. Could it be, Oh, Great Spirit could it be that her beloved had gone down with the rocks and perished. Her heart was almost stilled with agonizing fear. She faltered a moment only. Gathering courage she leaned over the edge of the cliff. There, stilled in death, lay the form of Kossookah, in a hollow at the base of the monolith.
The shock had cleared her mind. Hastily and with steady hands now she builds a signal fire on the rocky cliff. The fire by its intensity interpreted in the light of Indian signal fires, calls for aid in distress. Slowly the hours drag by. At last help arrives. Young saplings of tamarack are lashed together, end to end, with thongs of deer skin. When all is ready Teeheeneh springs forward and begs that no hands save hers shall touch her beloved dead. Slowly strong hands lower her to the side of the prostrate form of Kossookah.
Kissing the pale lips of the dead warrior Teeheeneh unbinds the deer thongs from about her own body. Silently and deftly she winds them about the prostrate form of Kossookah. At a signal from Teeheeneh the lifeless body is drawn up. Again the improvised rope is lowered. Teeheeneh nervously clutches the pole, puts her foot in the rawhide loop and waves her hand as a signal to be drawn up.
Long and silently she gazes into the once love lit eyes of her dead hero. Her slight body sways and trembles like a reed swept by the wintry wind. Still silent, she sinks quivering on the bosom of her beloved. Gently they raise her, but her heart had broken and her soul taken its flight.
The fateful arrow was never found. The Indians say that it was spirited away by Teeheeneh and Kossookah and kept by them as a memento of their plighted troth and the close of their life on earth.
On gossamer floats, their souls were carried, by unseen hands over the mountains to the Elysian Plains beyond, where there are no pitfalls and no broken hearts.
Hummoo, the Lost Arrow, still stands, a monument to the brave Kossookah.
See, “In The Heart of the Sierras,” by J. M. Hutchings. Mr. Hutchings lived twenty-five years in the YoSemite Valley and knows this, the most beautiful, wild, and romantic spot on the American Continent, in all its varying moods of summer calm and wintry storm, and writes of it with a loving and sympathetic touch.
