176 THE GALLINOMERO. 
off the flies. The California Indian has a negro’s fondness for the sun- 
shine. 
But the men provide all the wood needed in the scullery and bring it 
in. Neither are they sluggards in this matter at all. I have seen Ventura 
and two or three of his right-hand men chopping lustily on a warm day in 
February until the perspiration rolled in great drops down their grave, 
dark, furrowed faces. Sometimes they have two or three cords of wood 
neatly stacked in ricks about the wigwam. Yet even then, with the heart- 
less cruelty of the race, they will dispatch an old man to the distant forest 
with an ax, and you may see him returning, with his white head painfully 
bowed under a back-load of knaggy limbs, and his bare bronzed bow-legs 
moving on with that cat-like softness and evenness of the Indian, but so 
slowly that the poor old creature scarcely seems to get on. 
Strange mingling of cruelty and generosity! Give the chief a hand- 
ful of buns on Christmas or a bottle of Bourbon, of which they are most 
covetous and stingy, yet will he distribute to alla portion, making his own 
no larger than any other. 
These Indians walk more pigeon-toed than do those on the Klamath, 
at least in old age, and they emit an odor which is a trifle more offensive. 
An Indian scarcely ever totters in his walk, no matter how old. All his 
life long he has put down his feet with so even and steady a motion that, if 
he can get on his legs at all, he moves forward with balance. 
They have the avarice common to the California Indians amusingly 
developed. One day I offered Ventura half a dollar if he would tell me 
what traditions he knew. He refused because he had been at the trouble 
of learning Spanish. He said it was worth more than half a dollar to learn 
Spanish, and if I wanted the traditions cheaper I must learn Indian. I did 
learn some Indian during the winter, and discovered that the sly old man 
had no traditions to speak of. 
When a strange Indian arrives in a camp of the Gallinomero some one 
says to him, ‘“d-mi-ka” (is that you)? To this he replies, “hi-0”, (yes) 
The stranger then advances into the circle or enters the wigwam, as the 
case may chance, and squats down without ceremony and without a word. 
A squaw brings him some food in a small basket, of which he partakes in 
