When the chief had gone, the others sat down and smoked again in silence.  After a long time, a weather-beaten old Indian got up and walked to the edge of the cliff.

“See,” he said, “there is the soul of our chief, waiting for us to go with him to the land of spirits.”

The others looked over, and saw the form of a man far below, waving the bough of a tree.

The old warrior now threw off his blanket and sang his death song.  Then he leaped off.  The others again looked over, and this time they saw two forms beckoning to them from below.

[Illustration]

One after another the Indians jumped, until there were left but two young men who were little more than boys.  These two boys were nephews of the chief.  They had never been in a war party.

The elder of the two showed his young brother the ghosts of the whole party standing below.  He told his brother he must jump off, but the frightened boy begged to be allowed to stay and die on the bare rock.

The elder seized him, and, after a struggle, pushed him over.  Then he quietly gathered up all the blankets and guns, and threw them off.  He thought the souls of his friends would need these things in their journey to the land of spirits.

When this was done, the young man sang his own death song and jumped off.  Falling swiftly as an arrow, feet downward, he struck a great snow drift at the bottom.  It received him like an immense feather bed.  He sank in so far that he had hard work to get out.  When he had succeeded, he found all of his party, not spirits, as he had expected, but living men, safe and sound.  The snow had saved them from injury.

HOW FREMONT CROSSED THE MOUNTAINS.

It is many years now since Captain Fremont made his great journey over plains and mountains to California.  At that time California belonged to Mexico.  The wild country east of it belonged to the United States.  There were hardly any roads and no railroads in the country west of the Missouri River.  Fremont was sent out to explore that country; that is, he was sent to find out what kind of a country it was.  The white people knew very little about it.

Fremont had a large party of men with many horses.  After months of travel he found himself near the great Californian mountains.  These mountains are called the Sierra Nevada, or “Snowy Range.”

Here some Indians came to see him.  He had a talk with them by signs, for he could not speak their language.  They told him he could cross the mountains in summer.  They said it was “six sleeps” to the place where the white men lived over the mountains.  They meant that a man would have to pass six nights on the road in going there.  But it was now winter, and they told him that no man could cross in the winter.  They held their hands above their heads to show him that the snow was deeper than a man is tall.