"BretHarte-ADriftFromRedwoodCamp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harte Bret)

with the surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by
reckless courage and unerring marksmanship. The frequent use of a
casual wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of
its members had kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the
aborigines and stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals.
The scalped and skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his
horse and held hideously upright by a cross of wood behind his
saddle, had passed, one night, a slow and ghastly apparition, into
camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had been found anchored on the
river-bed, disembowelled and filled with stone and gravel. The
solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp who fell into the
enemy's hands was doomed.

Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to
subside in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps,
dulled his apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to
become again uppermost. He knew that the low bark tents, or
wigwams, of the Indians were hung with strips of dried salmon, and
his whole being was new centered upon an attempt to stealthily
procure a delicious morsel. As yet he had distinguished no other
sign of life or habitation; a few moments later, however, and grown
bolder with an animal-like trustfulness in his momentary security,
he crept out of the thicket and found himself near a long, low
mound or burrow-like structure of mud and bark on the river-bank.
A single narrow opening, not unlike the entrance of an Esquimau
hut, gave upon the river. Martin had no difficulty in recognizing
the character of the building. It was a "sweathouse," an
institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes of
California. Half a religious temple, it was also half a sanitary
asylum, was used as a Russian bath or superheated vault, from which
the braves, sweltering and stifling all night, by smothered fires,
at early dawn plunged, perspiring, into the ice-cold river. The
heat and smoke were further utilized to dry and cure the long
strips of fish hanging from the roof, and it was through the narrow
aperture that served as a chimney that the odor escaped which
Martin had detected. He knew that as the bathers only occupied the
house from midnight to early morn, it was now probably empty. He
advanced confidently toward it.

He was a little surprised to find that the small open space between
it and the river was occupied by a rude scaffolding, like that on
which certain tribes exposed their dead, but in this instance it
only contained the feathered leggings, fringed blanket, and eagle-
plumed head-dress of some brave. He did not, however, linger in
this plainly visible area, but quickly dropped on all fours and
crept into the interior of the house. Here he completed his feast
with the fish, and warmed his chilled limbs on the embers of the
still smouldering fires. It was while drying his tattered clothes
and shoeless feet that he thought of the dead brave's useless
leggings and moccasins, and it occurred to him that he would be