And the soft moon rose up slowly, and calmly she looked down
On the red sand of the battle-field with bloody corses strewn;
Yet calmly on that dreadful scene her pale light seemed to shine,
As it shone on distant Bingen, fair Bingen on the Rhine.
CAROLINE E.S. NORTON.
OSITO.
n the lofty mountain that faced the captain's cabin the frost had already made an insidious approach, and the slender thickets of quaking ash that marked the course of each tiny torrent, now stood out in resplendent hues and shone afar off like gay ribbons running through the dark-green pines. Gorgeously, too, with scarlet, crimson and gold, gleamed the lower spurs, where the oak-brush grew in dense masses and bore beneath a blaze of color, a goodly harvest of acorns, now ripe and loosened in their cups.
It was where one of these spurs joined the parent mountain, where the oak-brush grew thickest, and, as a consequence, the acorns were most abundant, that the captain, well versed in wood-craft mysteries, had built his bear trap. For two days he had been engaged upon it, and now, as the evening drew on, he sat contemplating it with satisfaction, as a work finished and perfected.
From his station there, on the breast of the lofty mountain, the captain could scan many an acre of sombre pine forest with pleasant little parks interspersed, and here and there long slopes brown with bunch grass. He was the lord of this wild domain. And yet his sway there was not undisputed. Behind an intervening spur to the westward ran an old Indian trail long traveled by the Southern Utes in their migrations north for trading and hunting purposes. And even now, a light smoke wafted upward on the evening air, told of a band encamped on the trail on their homeward journey to the Southwest.