221CHAPTER XXIV
THE INDIANS
Although we did not immediately run into the expected thousands, nor did the promise of that first glorious day of discovery quite fulfil itself, nevertheless our new diggings turned out to be very rich. We fell into routine; and the days and weeks slipped by. Bagsby and one companion went out every day to hunt or to fish. We took turns at a vacation in camp. Every night we “blew” our day’s collection of sand, weighed the gold, and packed it away. Our accumulations were getting to be very valuable.
For a month we lived this idyllic life quite unmolested, and had gradually come to feel that we were so far out of the world that nothing would ever disturb us. The days seemed all alike, clear, sparkling, cloudless. It was my first experience with the California climate, and these things were a perpetual wonder to my New England mind.
Then one day when I was camp keeper, at the upper end of our long meadow, a number of men emerged from the willows and hesitated uncertainly. They were too far away to be plainly distinguishable, but I believed in taking no chances, so I fired my revolver to attract the attention of my companions. They looked up from their labour, saw the men, and promptly came into camp.
The group still hesitated at the edge of the thicket. 222 Then one of them waved something white. We waved in return; whereupon they advanced slowly in our direction.
As they neared we saw them to be Indians. Their leader held before him a stick to which had been tied a number of white feathers. As they approached us they began to leap and dance to the accompaniment of a weird rising and falling chant. They certainly did not look very formidable, with their heterogeneous mixture of clothing, their round, black, stupid faces and their straight hair. Most of them were armed simply with bows and arrows, but three carried specimens of the long Spanish musket.
Buck Barry promptly sallied out to meet them, and shook hands with the foremost. They then advanced to where we were gathered and squatted on the ground. They were certainly a villainous and dirty looking lot of savages, short, thickset, round faced, heavy featured, with coarse, black, matted hair and little twinkling eyes. A more brutish lot of human beings I had never seen; and I was almost deceived into thinking them too stupid to be dangerous. The leaders had on remnants of civilized clothing, but the rank and file were content with scraps of blanket, old ragged coats, single shirts, and the like. The oldest man produced a long pipe from beneath his blanket, filled it with a few grains of coarse tobacco, lighted it by means of a coal from our fire, puffed twice on it, and passed it to me. I perforce had to whiff at it also, though the necessity nearly turned my stomach. I might next have given it to one of our own party, but I did not want to deprive him 223 of my own first hand sensation, so I handed it back to another of the visitors for fresh inoculation, as it were. Evidently I had by accident hit on acceptable etiquette, as deep grunts of satisfaction testified. After we had had a whiff all around, the chief opened negotiations in Spanish. Most of us by now had learned enough of it from our intercourse with Don Gaspar and Vasquez to understand without interpretation.
The Indians said they wanted to trade.
We replied that we saw nothing they might trade with us.