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There were fifteen Mongols in sight, a half dozen women and two children adding to the count. On a hillock near their yurts, the round brush-and-hide shelters not too different from the wickiups of Travis' own people was a crude drum, a hide stretched taut over a hollowed section of log.
The Shoshones live like their trees, with great spaces between, and in pairs and in family groups they set up wattled huts by the infrequent springs. More wickiups than two make a very great number. Their shelters are lightly built, for they travel much and far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but they are not more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.
One moment the Apaches were squatting among their lodges; and in the next moment people and goods and wickiups were gone; the place was bare. Every warrior and squaw and child seized what objects were nearest at hand, overlooking none, and scampered off with them.
The thing lagged along for a while, and Johnson tried to set several schemes going, without success. Finally, one fine morning, the proprietor of a lumber yard thought some of his piles of lumber had been tampered with. He saw some tracks, which he followed, and in the outskirts of the town, near a bunch of wickiups, he came upon two other lumber-yard men, also following tracks.
When the Gila City gold rush set in Yuma was the point to which the adventurers came to reach the new city. I have heard that as many as three thousand gold seekers congregated at this find, but nothing is now to be seen of the former town but a few old deserted shacks and some Indian wickiups.
"The hail's goin' to drive all through the night," Giant Tom called out in the darkness. "Right you are," said the hunter, "and the Sioux won't think of trying that pass on such a night. They're back in the valley, in wickiups of their own." "Might it not stop them entirely?" asked Will. "No, young William, it won't," said the Little Giant.
Before the echoes of MacNair's voice had died away dark forms were speeding through the moonlight. From all directions they came; from the cabins that yet remained standing, from the tents pitched close against the unburned walls of the stockade, from rude wickiups of skins and of brushwood. Old men and young men they answered the call, and each in his hand bore a rifle.
On the third day, ranging eastward along the base of the mountain range, Travis found what he believed would be an acceptable camp site. There was a canyon with a good spring of water cut round by well-marked game trails. A series of ledges brought him up to a small plateau where scrub wood could be used to build the wickiups.
While the last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks below to tell the news to the rest of his band. Their camp lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems.
Over wickiups, squaws, bucks and children the frightened beast leaped. Just how he got out safe among his companions Small never knew, but he escaped, only to be desperately wounded in the first fight in the lava beds, and later finding a watery grave in Klamath river while sailing a pleasure boat.
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